What, then, is the potency of life? A life, a singular life, a life that dies in the event, a fragile life that does not live in time and cannot be evaluated in terms of money – a life that necessarily dies in its incarnations. . . . Throughout the history of philosophy, philosophers have elevated bizarre idols to obscure this transcendental field. . . . the situation is hardly improved when one throws out the transcendent, allowing capital and time to become impersonal grounds of evaluation and thought. Life is controlled by that which does not live. All manner of tyrants and idols have been worshipped as supreme values, as dogmatic images of thought, or as transcendentals – philosophy is superstitious, all too superstitious.
All it requires is for thought to consider a transcendental persona, to show a little care for a dying rogue, to try resuscitation once more, to breathe a little life into ‘this dank carcass,’ ‘this flabby lump of mortality’, for thought to lend ‘a hand, a heart, and a soul’. For, in modern life, this dying rogue is no one but ourselves, and the transcendental persona of thought is our doctor. Life is immanence, ‘the most intimate within thought’, yet it is also transcendence, ‘an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper than any internal world.’ So often the concepts of immanence and transcendence are opposed to each other, as if one could be thought without the other. Nevertheless, the criteria for absolute immanence and absolute transcendence are the same: they consist in removing all pretenders from the role of the absolute. Transcendence only has a relation to this world in immanence; immanence only constitutes this world in transcendence. [emphasis mine]
– Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, 166.
Category: delueze and guattari
Digging Into the End
I remember when my little brain first gained the conceptual ability to ponder (outer) space. I let my mind wander as far as it would go into space. It traveled deeper and deeper where the star lights began to grow dim. Then light became absent. Things slowed down but my mind continued. Eventually my mind reached a wall, or more accurately a corner, a point where my mind was funneled. This is the end, there is no further. But the thought came to me, What if I began to dig into the end?
This thinking always comes back to me when the question of immanence and transcendence surfaces. It always supported, in my mind, a position of transcendence. I no longer see this as the case. I see the question now more as a Hebrew one; that is a question of boundary. In any event I have been trying to think through various expressions of immanence lately. Most of them are loosely or directly connected with Gilles Deleuze (and seems to characterize much of the contributions at AUFS). Currently I am reading Philip Goodchild’s Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire. As I am working through many things I do not understand I came across a very helpful and short statement on understanding immanence.
A truly critical philosophy can only be judged by the immanence of its criteria: it must do what it says, and say what it does. It becomes a being-thought: a thought of being and a being of thought. The second limit of critical philosophy is therefore a pure plane of immanence; this is the only possible meaning of the ‘end of philosophy’. Immanence does not mean the absence of determination; rather, it implies that all that one is should be put into how one thinks, so that one’s entire mode of existence may be changed by encounters and idea within thought. [emphasis added]
This is far and away the most helpful thinking I have encountered in this discussion. I have always approached the question as a jockeying for position over transcendence. Who is policing the boundaries? Who is claiming access or insight into the other side? Who has dug through the end? Goodchild’s (or Delueze’s) posture orients the question much more existentially and in many ways reminds me of statements found in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in which the Underground Man attempts to face himself.
There are certain things in a man’s past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends. Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret. But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind.
. . .
I particularly want to put the whole thing to the test to see whether I can be absolutely frank with myself and not be afraid of the whole truth.
This thinking has no interest in the perception from outside as an abstracted and inaccessible site of conversation. This thinking desires to put all into play; a venture of risk and trust. I cannot rely on a secure deposit outside the relations of this world. What else is kenosis? As such this becomes a venture that may offer traction to the Christian notion of faith. And perhaps more importantly this thinking may actually put flesh on the possibility of conversion.
There is No Oedipal Triangle
I am slowly and awkwardly making my way through Anti-Oedipus. The process reminds me a little of my first venture through The Brothers Karamazov. At many points I had the Russian names all jumbled, I had put it down for weeks at a time and then picked up wherever it was that I left off not entirely sure of just what I was entering back into. It was through that process I came to realize that some books simply needed to be read once so that a basic orientation could be laid for a second reading. Perhaps this is a lousy and ineffective reading strategy but it has helped sustain my spirit while plodding through books I did not understand (only later to be greatly enlightened by them). In any event Delueze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is of a similar but also entirely different order. I rarely know just what the hell is going on. There have been, however, enough intersections of clarity that offer themselves as tiny beacons to start charting rough waters. I recently read one such section.
There is no Oedipal Triangle: Oedipus is always open in an open social field. Oedipus opens to the four winds, to the four corners of the social field (not even 3+1, but 4+n). A poorly closed triangle, a porous or seeping triangle, an exploded triangle from which the flows of desire escape in the direction of other territories. It is strange that we had to wait for the dreams of colonized peoples in order to see that, on the vertices of the pseudo triangle, mommy was dancing with missionary, daddy was being fucked by the tax collector, while the self was being beaten by the white man. It is precisely this pairing of the parental figures with agents of another nature, their locking embrace similar to that of wrestlers, that keeps the triangle from closing up again, from being valid in itself, and from claiming to express or represent this different nature of the agents that are in question in the unconscious itself. . . . It could always be said that these extreme situations of war trauma, of colonization, of dire poverty, and so on, are unfavorable to the construction of the Oedipal apparatus – and that it is precisely because of this that these situations favor a psychotic development or explosion – but we have a strong feeling that the problem lies elsewhere. Apart from the fact that a certain degree of comfort found in the bourgeois family is admittedly necessary to turn out oedipalized subjects, the question of knowing what is actually invested in the comfortable conditions of a supposedly normal or normative Oedipus is pushed still further into the background.
The revolutionary is the first to have the right to say: “Oedipus? Never heard of it.”
Anti-Oedipus, 96.
David CL Driedger 