Difference in itself

Still, despite Deleuze's distancing from creative evolution, something substantial persists across his changing relation to both Bergson and biology.

Namely, his commitment to a notion of internal difference, or difference in itself. This commitment motivates Deleuze's initial adherence to Bergson's creative evolutionism no less than his later "break" with Bergson over the status of intensity as well as the correlated model of creative involution he develops together with Guattari. The initial impetus driving Deleuze's effort to rehabilitate the fraught notion of the elan vital and with it, the very career of Bergson as philosopher, was nothing other than the notion of internal difference. As he reconstructs it in his 1956 essay, "Bergson's Conception of Difference," and then again in his 1966 Bergsonism, the elan vital introduces an explosive force internal to the process of evolution (internal difference) that is capable of accounting for the positive power of time as a source of creative invention. With the progress of his own
philosophical career, Deleuze soon found reason to temper his initial adherence to Bergsonism--and specifically, to Bergson's
derivation of internal difference from qualitative difference--without in any way abandoning his own commitment to
internal difference.

As early as Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze traces qualitative difference or difference in kind (together with quantitative difference or difference in degree) to a fluid continuum of intensity, thereby eschewing Bergson's argument that qualitative difference is itself one of two tendencies being differentiated and thus, a tendency internal to difference that, as Deleuze puts it, "show[s] the way in which a thing varies qualitatively in time".

voir http://www.situation.ru/app/index.htm

Vital difference

It is precisely this realism and the biological basis of differentiation that Deleuze eschews in his effort to arrive at a (philosophical) principle of difference in itself.

The roots of such a principle--a principle that will underwrite both Deleuze's philosophical Aufhebung of biology in Difference and Repetition and D+G's marginalization of the organism in A Thousand Plateaus--can be found in Deleuze's interpretation of vital difference as internal difference in Bergsonism.

Introduced in the context of an effort to distinguish Bergsonian creative evolution from Darwinism, this interpretation foregrounds Bergson's stress on the indeterminacy of vital
difference in order to present the Elan vital as the ultimate and purely internal cause of differentiation above and beyond any resistance matter offers to life, and indeed in place of
such resistance. Before expressing itself as material differentiation, that is, the Elan vital differs from itself: it is difference in itself.

What this means is that vital difference is virtual and that expressed difference is the
actualization of virtual life.

from Mark Hansen
Princeton University

Changing concepts

Creation of Concepts

For Rawls: Indeterminate “ideas” (such as the rights of individual) inform the creation of “concepts” (such as Justice and Original Position), which allow for systematic “conceptions”; principles for deciding which concepts are arbitrary.

With Rawl’s constructivism, the content of the concept (for example Justice) is procedurally constructed not from historically loaded ideas, but as the outcome of a dialogue between ideas. This is definitely not the same as Deleuze.

Deleuze does not see the creation of concepts (i.e. Philosophy) as the result of a conversation. In “What is Philosophy” Deleuze describes a “horror” of discussions within Philosophy. This is his account of a ‘rhizome-book’ of movement in concepts (in Patton’s paper above).

Deleuze sees distinct concepts, but something “passes between them”. So internal consistency, but “exo-consistency” between changes. Source of mobility through these connections. ”Relations to concepts provide pathways to others”. This is linked to the plane of immanence, and the (changing) image of thought; searching for different image of thought. An account of “Becoming Just” contour configuration, constellation.

Patton sees the mobility provided by Deleuze as a useful awareness, thinks it is apparent that the creation of Justice is exemplary of Deleuze’s concept creation: Justice (Rawls) is a mobile concept (Deleuze). Conception of Justice becomes historical as “incremental conceptions”. ”Subject to assumption that firmly held convictions change”. Patton examines how Rawls was Looking at Justice as primary social concept, but focussed on Stability, as he wanted to say the Just was more stable. Through the forces between concepts, the one effected the other.

Conceptual personae

From What is Philosophy, by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari:

“The conceptual persona is not the philosopher’s representative but, rather, the reverse: the philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other personae who are the intercessors, the real subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosdopher’s “heteronyms,” and the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae.”

For Rawls; Rational, Citizens, and Reasonable.
For Deleuze: ”Friend of concept” (Nietzsche, Blanchot), set up to measure forces outside of philosophy . Future transformations. Becoming.

from http://blog.neonascent.net/

Joyful way of thinking

In psychoanalytic terms, Hegel’s ontology is fundamentally mournful, while Heidegger’s ontology is fundamentally melancholic.

Brent Adkins argues that the solution to this antinomy is found in Deleuze and Guatttari’s Anti-Oedipus, where they take us beyond the limits of mourning and melancholia by refusing both. The result is a new (joyful) way of thinking about death that does not require philosophy to be a constant meditation on death.

Deleuze believed that life is desire, and that there are two distinct ways of thinking about desire. The first is that we only desire because we lack something. The other is called productive desire, in that we desire to make new connections, not necessarily because we lack connections, but because we want to try something new. Deleuze would argue that Heidegger and Hegel would think that desires are based on a lack of something. Deleuze ultimately believed that life is not about living to fill a lack or a void, but rather to make connections. Because Deleuze conceived of desire as productive, his conception of death is joyful rather than mournful or melancholic.

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Affirmation cannot be simply opposed to negation

According to Deleuze, the Nietzschean "affirmation" cannot be opposed to "negation”.

Instead, it should be read as a multiplicity of becoming that exists in the play of its difference. Here, Nietzsche, as the philosopher of multiplicity, influences not only Deleuze, but Derrida and Foucault as well. Yet, along with a philosophy of multiplicity, poststructuralists, as neo-Nietzscheans, inherit the standard accusations that are leveled against Nietzsche:

that they are unable to account for agency, responsibility, rationality, human nature, community, and ethical and political values.

In Critical Resistance, these accusations are met head on. Not only can poststructuralism account for these notions, but, it can, also redeploy them as a radical means of critical resistance,
which, with a Nietzschean edge, is resistance that is self critical— resistance that resists itself.


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