This is a continuation from Part One. You can find May’s Lecture Series on Deleuze here.
Goddamn I can get lost in the prologue sometimes. Thanks for indulging me fam. I’ll try to be more succinct with the through-line this time. This abstract philosophical pondering ultimately leads to something executable. A process. Praxis. I promise.
First a quick recap from my entry on the first lecture:
- The Nature of Identity: Takes from Existentialism (individual is free to create meaning), to Structuralism (identity shaped by broader systems), to Post-Structuralists like Foucault (identity is shaped by many overlapping forces that change over time).
- Foucault gets us to the point where May says: we’re no longer seeing our identities as products of things within us (essences), but rather as products of a contingent, changeable, reworkable history…which means they can be changed.
- Deleuze also wrestled with how to stop thinking of identities as the product of essences, but he chooses a very different path: ontology (which we can define as the study of what is, or what exists).
- Deleuze’s ontology moves past the idea of identities as primary, arguing that difference itself is primary.
That’s kinda where I left it. May says there’s a tendency to think about identities as the things that are there first. And difference as whatever it is that distinguishes one thing from another. So identities are primary, difference is secondary.
Yeah, 40 years on the planet and I had never questioned this basic premise.
So the question for Deleuze is, can we think of difference, not simply as something that comes from identities, but difference, he says, in itself. Not difference as the difference between two identities, but can we think of difference on its own, simply as difference.
Let’s see where this goes!
May starts his second lecture breaking down the philosophical foundations of difference. He looks at Aristotle, who gave us the structure of categories, which relegates difference as secondary, existing between pre-established identities (ie, the difference between a horse and a cow).
Then we have Hegel and the dialectical process, whereby progress arises through conflict and negation of prior states. Deleuze argues that Hegel’s dialectic is form of difference, but that it still presupposes identities that oppose each other. He seeks a philosophy where difference is affirmed as primary and generative, not defined through negation or opposition.
This turns Deleuze to Nietzsche and his idea of active vs. reactive. Active forces act according to their own path without reference to opposition. May gives the example of the Impressionist artists who created their own salons to display their work without opposing traditional art directly. Reactive forces act by negating active forces (a la Hegel’s dialectic). Deleuze, via Nietzsche, proposes making the negative secondary, a byproduct of active forces rather than a driving principle.
Deleuze then takes Nietzsche’s central concept of the Eternal Return (which asks if one’s actions are worth repeating infinitely), and ontologically re-interprets it as not the eternal return of the same, but the eternal return of difference itself. Difference continuously generates new identities, making creativity infinite.
May then goes to Plato, who Deleuze says unintentionally opens the door to the primacy of difference. This happens through Plato’s simulacra, which are the false participants — objects that appear to partake in the form (e.g. Beauty itself), but do not. Deleuze argues that reliance on myths to describe forms indicates their instability. If forms are myths, then there is no original; all “copies” are simulacra. Without an original form, identities are generated by difference itself, not by participation in a pre-existing essence.
At the end of the second lecture I think I had absorbed two new profound thoughts. First: the dialectical process so revered in Marxism, is in fact “the labor of the negative”. And there is just something less appealing about a philosophical framework that defines identities through opposition.
The second idea that grabbed me by the metaphysical balls was difference as a generative field. Something tells me this is the key to applying Deleuze’s philosophy to the creative act.
May starts the third lecture by honing in on Deleuze’s concept The Dogmatic Image of Thought. This is essentially the dominant philosophical tradition, which starts with certain assumptions about fixed identities. It fails to break free from preconceptions, thus offering nothing truly new or creative.
May says Deleuze talks about the encounter as an event or experience that disrupts recognition and forces one to think differently. Kant’s sublime is one example: something that overwhelms the senses and is beyond comprehension. Deleuze asserts thought is no longer about aligning with truth but engaging with what is “interesting, remarkable, and important.”
At this point, May brings in Deleuze’s methodology of Transcendental Empiricism. And honestly, reviewing my notes, I think I lack a full understanding of what Deleuze is getting at here. What I have noted, but would like to expand on is:
- Deleuze focuses on the conditions of actual experiences rather than possible ones.
- He emphasizes the role of difference as a generative force, not merely a relational one.
- Difference is not mediated by pre-existing identities but is the basis for new identities and experiences.
- Transcendental empiricism aims to explore how thought arises from encounters with difference.
Philosophy ultimately becomes an experimentation with difference. Thought must sever its reliance on fixed identities and common sense. We must become worthy of the event, engage with the unexpected and create new modes of understanding.
So I am only three lectures in, but what I hope is evident is my excitement about Deleuze’s ideas of creation and experimentation. Ultimately I think this is a very liberatory philosophy and one that serves the artistic act. But it is still so abstract. I will continue these entries on May and Deleuze until I reach a generative position.