Fancy, David. ‘A Sacred Affirmation’: Immanent Performativity in Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.’ Performance Research. 19.2 (2014): 74-83. (original) (raw)
Related papers
2017
This article addresses the problematic ontology of postdramatic theatre. In particular, it looks at examples of “in-yer-face” productions, such as Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis and Cleansed, as well as Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker and Far Away. In doing so, it aims to uncover a novel way of positioning the notion of mimesis within the ontological texture of these non-Aristotelian works for the theatre. Herein mimesis becomes a constitutive principle and a generative procedure that guarantees continuity between disparate entities, such as words and worlds, pre-representational regions and representation, infinite indetermination and finitude. It is similar in form and function to Deleuze’s notions of “expression” and “re-expression” within Spinoza’s substance–essence–attribute and attribute–mode–modification triads as described in Expressionism in Philosophy. Just as expression carries forward a progression from the infinite to the finite whereby the expressible (substance) becomes expressed sense, so does mimesis assume the role of a generative intermediary in the composition of literary worlds in postdramatic theatre. As a relational and transmissive component, Deleuze’s “expression” does not agree with Romanticist treatments of the term as “the internal made external” but captures the very motion of the expression of substance within what Thacker defines as a regime of “a radical Neoplatonism without a centre.” Thus described, expression becomes a topological progression. It precipitates the emergence of literary worlds from a vantage point of univocity, acting as a fluxional immanent substratum that is fundamentally generous, affluent, and flowing forth. Assuming this vantage point, one begins to notice that postdramatic works for the theatre—albeit nonsensical to the habitual gaze—exhibit a quasi-causal logic governed by the continual interaction of Deleuzian “expression” and “sense.” This becomes especially visible in “in-yer-face” plays. Rather than explaining such plays in experiential terms, the present paper assumes the stance that their “nonsensical” infusions expose the work of an event of sense within a play’s ontological texture. Confronted with the consolidation of an event of sense within the motion of expression, plays are at pains to readjust, recompose, and thus incorporate the supernumerary within their textual fabric. The result is an inimical, injurious immanence.
PHILOSOPHICAL ARCHITECTONICS AND THEATRICALITY IN GILLES DELEUZE'S THEORY
Theatricality, as a methodological basis of Deleuze's theory, insinuates a new thought of Being/beings by emancipating philosophy from its anthropological orientation. Despite the fact that the phenomenological methodologies attempted to link the transcendental with the empirical domain, the source of reflexivity was still the subject. Deleuze's ontological repetition maintains the infinite reflection of the transcendental and the empirical domains into each other, yet it posits the symbolic order as the third order where the infinite reflexive expansion between concept and matter becomes immanently transcended. By taking this formulation as its point of departure, this article analyzes how Deleuze's notion of theatricality operates as the self-reflexive and excessive origin of thought.
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
In keeping with the Edinburgh Philosophical Guides series aims, the central principle of this introduction is to provide the reader with the means and context necessary to develop an understanding of the key arguments of Deleuze’s most influential philosophical work, Difference and Repetition. The main hurdles new readers face when approaching Difference and Repetition are the wide range of philosophical sources Deleuze draws upon and the density of his philosophical prose. The book will present a novel interpretation of Deleuze’s philosophical project and situate Deleuze within the broader philosophical tradition, interweaving accounts of his interlocutors where they are absent from the text with clear reconstructions of his own arguments. While it is written in an accessible style for readers new to Deleuze, it will also be of interest to advanced scholars as the first sustained attempt to situate this major work within the wider philosophical community.
The concept of dramatization represents a rhetorical and conceptual tension in Deleuze's philosophy in that it refers both to autopoietic ontological processes and to a critical philosophical method. Commentators are wont to refer to either one or the other, saying little about how or if these two fundamentally distinct usages can be thought together; that is what we aim to do here. By unravelling the conceptual transformations of the term, we can gain an appreciation for the double characterisation of dramatization and its centrifugal nature. We begin with the hypothesis that dramatization is linked to actualisation in the first sense and counteractualisation in the second. The fundamental question that we would like to address is: how are these two views to be reconciled? Addressing this question leads us to the conclusion that dramatization becomes an ethical imperative for philosophical subjects to perform certain philosophical exercises, that is, to become worthy of the event. The particular philosophical exercise that is emphasised is the dramatization of a paradoxical thought of death. Ultimately, we suggest that dramatization can be galvanised for both an emancipatory politics and an ethico-aesthetic life practice.
Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 2019
This essay starts from a consideration of Deleuze's theory of time. It begins with the empty form of time. But the essay's aim is to understand Deleuze's reversal of Platonism in his 1968 Difference and Repetition. There is no question that the stakes of the reversal of Platonism are ontological. But I argue that what is really at stake is a movement of demoralisation. The essay proceeds in three steps. First, we determine what sufficient reason or grounding is, for Deleuze. Sufficient reason is struck with an irreducible ambiguity. It is this ambiguity in sufficient reason that allows it to be taken advantage of, to be used by representation and good sense for a moral purpose. The second part of the essay will therefore concern 'the moralisation of sufficient reason'. Its focus will be good sense. But then, third, we must understand Deleuze's 'demoralisation of sufficient reason', which necessarily passes through others. Like sufficient reason, others are ambiguous, at once lending themselves to what cancels differences, and opening the way towards difference and intensity. The third step focuses on what Deleuze calls 'the ethics of intensive quantities'. In the Conclusion, I examine Deleuze's famous, almost cliché, definition of ethics as not being unworthy of the event and, through the empty form of time, I connect it to Kant's formalistic ethics.
Dramatization and Poeticization: Deleuze and the Poeticity of Metaphysics
Philosophy Today, 2025
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze evokes dramatization when he suggests that intensities must dramatize the Ideas to condition their actualization. This allusion to an artistic category, in the midst of his metaphysical inquiry, has remained obscure, and despite its cruciality, it is not clear why he appeals to dramatization to explain any actualization and not solely the artistic actualization. This essay attempts to elucidate this ambiguity, by foregrounding a zone of torsional continuity, wherein intensity encounters the Idea and expresses it through dramatization. This process is at play in the actualization of the organic field, social field, and aesthetic field, where an intensive larval subject—embryo, disentangled individual, artist—encounters the biological, social, or artistic Idea. While referring to the artistic encounter, it is shown how dramatization is indispensable to actualize every Idea. Finally, through Tarkovsky and Blanchot, the notion of poeticization is formulated that, while complementing dramatization, unveils certain tacit nuances of the Deleuzian actualization.
Encounters with the Virtual: The Experience of Art In Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy
2010
The topic of my thesis is the notion of existence as an encounter, as developed in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). What this denotes is a critical stance towards a major current in Western philosophical tradition which Deleuze nominates as representational thinking. Such thinking strives to provide a stable ground for identities by appealing to transcendent structures "behind" the apparent reality and explaining the manifest diversity of the given by such notions as essence, idea, God, or totality of the world. In contrast to this, Deleuze states that abstractions such as these do not explain anything, but rather that they need to be explained. Yet, Deleuze does not appeal merely to the given. He sees that one must posit a genetic element that accounts for experience, and this element must not be "naïvely" traced from the empirical. Deleuze nominates his philosophy as "transcendental empiricism" and he seeks to bring together the approaches of both empiricism and transcendental philosophy. In chapter one I look into the motivations of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and analyse it as an encounter between Deleuze's readings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. This encounter regards, first of all, the question of subjectivity. Deleuze takes from Hume an orientation towards the specificity of empirical sensibility, while Kant provides Deleuze a basic framework for an account of the emergence of the empirical. The conditions of experience must be situated within the immanence of the world and, accordingly, understood as changing. What this amounts to is a conception of identity as nonessential process. A pre-given concept of identity does not explain the nature of things, but the concept itself must be explained. From this point of view, the process of individualization must become the central concern. In chapter two I discuss Deleuze's concept of the affect as the basis of identity and his affiliation with the theories of Gilbert Simondon and Jakob von Uexküll. From this basis develops a morphogenetic theory of individuation-as-process. In analysing such a process of individuation, the modal category of the virtual becomes of great value, being an open, indeterminate "charge" of potentiality. As the virtual concerns becoming or the continuous process of actualisation, then time, rather than space, will be the privileged field of consideration. Chapter three is devoted to the discussion of the temporal aspect of the virtual and difference-without-identity. The work of Bergson regarding the nature of time is especially important to Deleuze. As "pure" time is heterogeneous, the essentially temporal process of subjectification results in a conception of the subject as composition: an assemblage of heterogeneous elements. Therefore art and aesthetic experience is valued by Deleuze because they disclose the construct-like nature of subjectivity in the sensations they produce. Through the domain of the aesthetic the subject is immersed in the network of affectivity that is the material diversity of the world. Chapter four addresses a phenomenon displaying this diversified indentity: the simulacrum. Both Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard use the concept in order to emphasise an identity that is not grounded in an essence. However, I see a decisive difference between them. Developed on the basis of the simulacrum, a theory of identity as assemblage emerges in chapter five. As the problematic of simulacra concerns perhaps foremost the artistic presentation, I shall look into the identity of a work of art as assemblage. To take an example of a concrete artistic practice and to remain within the problematic of the simulacrum, I shall finally address the question of reproductionparticularly in the case recorded music-and its identity regarding the work of art. In conclusion, I propose that by overturning its initial representational schema, phonographic music addresses its own medium and turns it into an inscription of difference, exposing the listener to an encounter with the virtual.
A Redemptive Deleuze? Choked Passages or the Politics of Contraction
When they want to discredit the political relevance of Deleuze’s thought, Hallward considers counter-effectuation as a ‘redemptive gesture’, and Rancière describes Deleuze’s history of cinema as a ‘history of redemption’. Each time, redemption refers pejoratively to a break ‘out of this world’ and a form of apolitical passivity, in an attempt to reduce Deleuze to be a mere ‘spiritual’ thinker, simply renewing ‘that “Oriental intuition” which Hegel found at work in Spinoza’s philosophy’ (Hallward 2006: 6). But is it all that simple? How should we envisage the relationship between creativity and redemption, politics and passivity in Deleuze’s work? And in what way does that concern Deleuze’s philosophy connection to the Non-West, and namely China?
To Come Into Being Hegel, Deleuze, and the Theater of Movement
2022
This paper explores two attempts to conceive of a genetic model of cognition and ontology of becoming through divergent accounts of the relation between conceptual and nonconceptual difference: Hegel’s conceptual realist account of becoming as the movement of radical negativity, and Deleuze’s structural realist account of Ideas as the individuation of intensive difference. I show how both attempts organize their respective accounts in relation to the perceived limitations of representation, understood either as an impure kind of cognition, or as a dogmatic model of thought as recognition. In both cases, representation is pathologized as preventing philosophy from grasping the creative dimension of thought, and its place within a dynamic reality. Nevertheless, I argue that just like the conceptual realist strategy surreptitiously relies on an unintelligible criterion of non-conceptual difference to set the dialectical movement of conceptual contradiction in motion, so the structural ...