Univocity or Equivocity? A reading between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière

EUROPE: Univocity or Equivocity? A reading between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière Luís Lima CEAA/ IC.NOVA/ UAL, OPorto-Lisbon, Portugal Abstract At the end of his book, La Chair des Mots, politiques de l'écriture (1998), Jacques Rancière evokes a wall, a frontier, in the nomad and plastic thinking of Gilles Deleuze. The approach is twofold: on the one hand, literary, summoning affections and concepts but, above all perceptions, these conceptual characters that Deleuze inaugurates in a between-two of philosophy and literature, «philosophiture», he would say, or «literasophy»; on the other hand, it is political, evoking the horizontality and verticality, equality and difference of a people to come. In both cases, Rancière envisions the possibility of a Deleuzian wall, which would be something of the order of the frontier. We know how Deleuze abhorred frontiers and, at least, among it, he would agenciate cracks and lines of passages, lines of escape, lines of flight. To retake the idea that Jacques Rancière explores in his text entitled Deleuze, Bartleby, and the literary formula, there would be a wall in Deleuze's thought, a limiting barrier of his own thinking. The end or the cut of the flow, according to Rancière, is stated as it: «The strength of any strong thought is also the ability of disposing itself its aporia, the point where it no longer passes». Now, Deleuze avoid the point, «to make the point» repulses him, always prefering the line. So this wall-end-point could not be a strong aporia in the bosom of a strong thought without also being a line of escape, a passage, an opening or a pause before gaining speed again. A wall of slowness to better accelerate. Here is what this article proposes to enunciate: from the characters that Deleuze extracts from the novels of the authors and the literature he appreciates to reach the haecceities, these asubjective singularities that are not identities but are perfectly individuated, to assure them a territory and a voice, the possibility of the univocity of an European people to come. Keywords: Deleuze, Literature, Ontology, Rancière, People-to-come. Luís Lima, EUROPE: Univocity or Equivocity? A reading between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière 139 Where life clogs us, intelligence opens a way, because if it is true that there is no remedy for an unshared love, the truth is that we escape the verification of a suffering, let alone be his by drawing the consequences it entails. Intelligence doesn't know these closed situations of dead end life Marcel Proust Opening This article is an attempt to conclude what seemed to us an unconcluded text by Jacques Rancière about deleuzian proposal of a literary formula in Melville’s Bartleby novel. At the end of his book La Chair des Mots, politiques de l’écriture [The Flesh of Words: the Politics of Writing] (1998), Jacques Rancière evokes a wall or a barrier in the nomadic, open and fluid thought of Gilles Deleuze. The approach is twofold: on one hand, it is literary, calling upon affects and concepts but above all percepts, those conceptual characters that Deleuze inaugurates in an ‘entre-deux’ (or in-between) of philosophy and literature – philosophiture, he would say, or literasophy 1 To return to the idea that Jacques Rancière explains in his text entitled Deleuze, Bartleby et la formule littéraire [Deleuze, Bartleby, and the Literary Formula], there exists a wall in Deleuze’s thought, a barrier-limit to his own thought. It is the end or the cutting of the flow, according to Rancière: “the strength of any strong thought is also its ability to arrange its aporia itself, the point where it ; on the other hand, it is political, evoking the horizontality and verticality, the equality and difference, of a people to come. In both cases, Rancière sees the possibility of a Deleuzean wall, which would be something similar to a border. We know how Deleuze abhorred borders unless it was to open up gaps in them as well as lines of passage, lines of flight. 1 Deleuze, Gilles: Littérasophie et Philosofiture, interview with Hélène Cixous; in Dialogues, 13 November 1973, p. 30. The title comes from the text transcribed from a radio programme of Roger Pillaudin on France Culture. The creation of concepts, through voluntary excess, so dear to Gilles Deleuze especially in his works with Félix Guattari, is clearly evident in the title of this programme in which philosophy and literature dance around, changing position, in the different zones of the written word in order to compose and re-compose themselves, expressively different, but with a force that is the same, that of the differentiation of the majority pattern of these two disciplines. It is in the ‘entre-deux’, the in-between, that the movement (of thought) accelerates and intensifies to create the concept. NOTES ON EUROPE. The Dogmatic Sleep Proceedings. Porto, October 29-31 2019 140 can no longer pass”. However, Deleuze detests the point; he always prefers the line. Therefore, this wall-final point could not be a strong aporia within a strong thought without also being a line of flight, a passage, opening or resting place before picking up speed again. A wall of slowness to accelerate better. What this article proposes is to start from the characters that Deleuze extracts from novels by the authors and of the literature he appreciates, as is the case of Charlus (Proust) or Bartleby (Melville), in order to reach the haecceities (Duns Scot/Simondon), these a-subjective singularities that are not identities but are perfectly individuated to ensure them a territory and a voice, the possibility of the univocity of a people becoming, a people to come, fleshed out by haecceities in individuation. So, could we conceive such a Deleuzean wall as being a murmur of Rancière’s instead, which might be knocked down and transformed into a wall of free stones, in an intifada that knocks down the univocity of the wall to counter it with the equivocity of the stones? But will it still be possible to find one single voice, that European voice, for all the modes that, in the difference, repeat it? It would be necessary to revisit Spinoza and the procedure of modes to find this European immanence for a people to come. Let us rather think about cutting the flow at the end of this line of flight as if a line with an end did not immediately become a segment, a line segment that can be remounted, enchained and provide material for the reconstruction of continuity and new lines of flight. Ultimately, the wall that Jacques Rancière builds at the limits of Deleuze’s thought could be constituted, or not, as the element where the shock of heterogeneous elements produces light. Does that light here illuminate the path that is always to be trodden by a [European] people in permanent (re) construction? Attempt at concluding a text to be concluded: about the formula To return to the idea that Jacques Rancière develops in his text Deleuze, Bartleby et la formule littéraire (1998) in which, based on an excerpt where Luís Lima, EUROPE: Univocity or Equivocity? A reading between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière 141 Gilles Deleuze discusses what a world “in process” or “an archipelago” would be like, which is one of fraternal individuals – “a wall of loose, uncemented stones where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to the others” (Deleuze apud Rancière, 1998, p. 1992 However, Deleuze detests the point, he does not like to point, either in the numerical sense or in the sense of the French expression faire le point or “to take stock of a situation”. He always prefers to trace a line, a line of flight, by dint of the vital movement of all the lines of life. This geometric aversion is sufficient to refute the forced reading that Jacques Rancière makes of the extract regarding the Melvillean brotherhood in Bartleby, ou la Formule, this wall-finalpoint-of-Deleuzean-thought; it could not be a strong aporia within a strong thought without being, simultaneously, a line of flight, a line of exit or a line of passage, a passage and opening, a resting place before once again taking up, at great speed, the movement of thinking. If we are attentive to this wall of loose stones – without succumbing immediately to the dictum of the mental image that shows us piles of granite stones in the open fields of southern Europe where mammals (goats, sheep, dogs and men), reptiles (lizards and snakes), birds and plants (brambles, blackberry bushes and moss) open up cracks and climb over with the greatest ease and naturalness of their animal and vegetable and mineral vitality – slowly so as to accelerate more quickly. ) – he defends that a Deleuzean wall will therefore exist that is a barrier-limit to his own thought: “And this is exactly what Deleuze does here when, in one single gesture, he clears the way of Deleuzism and sends it into the wall” (idem, p. 203). The end or the cutting of the flow of all Deleuze’s thought, according to Rancière, clashes with this aporia: “the strength of any strong thought is also its ability to arrange its aporia itself, the point where it can no longer pass” (ibidem). This is what we propose here: to start from the characters that Deleuze extracts from the tales, novellas and novels of North American authors, and to forget Antonin Artaud (body without organs), Henri Michaux (multiplicities and properties), Franz Kafka (minorities) and a biased appreciation of Proust by the 2 Translator’s note: All the references in this article refer to the French editions in the bibliography. NOTES ON EUROPE. The Dogmatic Sleep Proceedings. Porto, October 29-31 2019 142 simple reading that Rancière applies to the commentaries that run through all Deleuzean thought, would be to once again cement Deleuze’s free thinking that, above all else, is made up of the creation of concepts – those loose stones that produce thought in their movement in an autonomous and heteronomous league (the “crowned anarchy” of which Deleuze speaks at the end of Différence et Répétition, 1968). Let us remember that through both French writers and American ones, Deleuze passes from romanesque characters to conceptual characters and, from there, to singular forces, pure relata, which are the haecceities3. This occurs in the case not only of the Baron de Charlus, who in the curvature of his voice and the elevation of his nose embodies the features of a whole blood-related people, a genetic brotherhood that circulates through the arteries of his literary and literal body, but also in the pure affirmation of Bartleby’s non-affirmation, which is the expressive voice of the immanence of a singular, but not subjective or, rather, a-subjective, voice: that is to say, individuation by haecceity. In order to reach the haecceities, to reach individuation through the text, what Deleuze does is not build a wall but rather the composition of an ontographic plane4 Rancière further disagrees (using the argument of Alain Badiou that reduces Deleuzean univocity not to an expressive modal multiplicity like Spinoza’s but to an original unicity that is contrary in every way to Deleuze’s theories of differential multiplicity) that this wall is a wall of non-passage, a total wall where “we do not go on, from the multitudinous incantation of Being, toward any political justice. Literature opens no passage to a Deleuzean politics” (Rancière, 1998, p. 202). After the Rancierian terms, the argument: “There is no Dionysian , where the lines of text are lines of life and where the writing plane is a vital plane of composition between the autonomy and the heteronomy of the characters who emit signals (more than signs); we can talk of an ontonomy. A being of the names that are, like in Proust, like in Nietzsche, a wind. 3 Cf. 1730 – Devenir-intense, devenir-animal, devenir-imperceptible in Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (1980). Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux. Paris, Minuit. 4 Cf. Lima, Luís (2013). Ontografias da Imanência (de Deleuze a Proust e volta), respigar, compor, expressar. PhD thesis in Aesthetics. Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. DOI: https://run.unl.pt/bitstream/10362/10188/1/luislima .pdf. Accessed on 15/07/19. Luís Lima, EUROPE: Univocity or Equivocity? A reading between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière 143 politics”. And “as loose as its stones might be,” this wall “is that in front of which the joyful expansion of the philosophers children of Dionysus is halted” (ibidem). Why would children stop in front of such a wall of loose stones instead of climbing over it as all children do, as goats, sheep, brambles and lizards do? The reason, concludes Rancière, is that the philosopher did not want disciples; Deleuze, like Dionysus, like Nietzsche, did not want disciples. To say, as Jacques Rancière does, that Dionysus did not appreciate philosophers but only asses is to forget that Zarathustra, in the cave at the top of the mountain with his animals, knew the answer the ass would always give him, his “Ye-a”, the affirmative consent characteristic of the German people. Zarathustra was seeking other actors, other flights, coming out from his cave at the top of the mountain where he established himself on a plane of free thinking: a plateau. What is the top of a wall but a micro-plane, a mountain plateau? But, naturally, without asceticism. Let us then look more closely at the wall of loose stones of Bartleby, of Melville, of Deleuze, and at the context from which the passage cited by Rancière was taken: It is first of all an affirmation of a world in process, an archipelago. Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines – for Truth always has “jagged edges.” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 110) What force does the term “wall” have if it is made of loose, uncemented stones? Is it not just one more Deleuzean oxymoron, one more topological object like the Möbius strip or Klein’s Bottle, more than surface and less than volume, or an object with n dimensions in the Riemannian space which is the topological space by nature of the vitalism of Deleuzean ontology? We read “process”, “loose stones”, “uncemented”, “relation”, “floating relations”, “islands and straits”, “immobile points”, “sinuous lines”, “archipelago”; Jacques Rancière wants to read “wall”, despite the warning Deleuze gives later on in the same paragraph: “But to reach this point, it was also necessary for the knowing subject, the sole NOTES ON EUROPE. The Dogmatic Sleep Proceedings. Porto, October 29-31 2019 144 proprietor, to give way to a community of explorers, the brothers of the archipelago, who replace knowledge with belief – or rather with ‘confidence’, not belief in another world, but confidence in this one, and in man as much as in God […] Pragmatism is this double principle of archipelago and hope” (idem, p. 111). However, the archipelago is everything except the community. And this is what Rancière fears. The crowned anarchy of Deleuzean politics is incompatible with the emancipating programme of the community to come. Even though the master might be ignorant, he knows that he must emancipate. Nor is it a pedagogy, and this is why Deleuze is the friend of children, of the childrenphilosophers or indeed of philosophy’s childhood, its happiness and sense of humour, as in Nietzsche. And this is why we can look at the “wall of loose stones” of the Melvillean brotherhood, of an anarchism of becoming, in the light of another formula, not that of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” but rather of the Deleuzean formula for the univocity of being. There is an aesthetic line inaugurated by Gilles Deleuze. But it is a line that is traced much earlier than is usually mentioned. It is not then with Francis Bacon (1984) or with the two volumes on cinema (1983 and 1985), or even with Critique et Clinique [Critically and Clinically] (1993) that the philosopher dedicates to literature. It is, for us, in the movement of his philosophical plane, in the movement that draws abstract lines that become lines of thought that become concrete, material and aesthetic, and that seek to affirm an ontology of univocity through movements of expressivity, difference, individuation. Everything was pointing in this direction ever since his commentary on expressivity in Spinoza (1968). After this date there is a dance that involves the works Différence et Répétition and Logique du sens [The Logic of Sense], and, to a certain extent, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux [A Thousand Plateaus] and Qu'est-ce que la Philosophie? [What is Philosophy?] since in these two works written with Félix Guattari, expressivity changes and the ritornello movement appears intermittently. To be more specific, let us think of the number of phrases constructed with the same expressive rhythm in Différence et Luís Lima, EUROPE: Univocity or Equivocity? A reading between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière 145 Répétition and Logique du sens. True refrains, or ritornellos. Here are two examples: The univocity of Being signifies that Being is Voice that it is said, and that it is said in one and the same “sense” of everything about which it is said. That of which it is said is not at all the same… (Deleuze, 1997, p. 211) Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself. (Deleuze, 1968, p. 53) The first is taken from Logique du sens and the second comes from Différence et Répétition. What we want to say is that the movement of thought immanent to its expression is the force of aesthetic individuation, the unique feature of a style that Deleuze had never abandoned, not even in his partnerships with Félix Guattari. The style changes. It becomes, however, faster, more peopled with concepts; it has accelerations and de-accelerations that are much more intense than in his first solo books. But this winning formula, because it is hypnotic like a refrain, a ritornello (which is, let us not forget, a force of affectation and aesthetic production by its very nature, according to Deleuze and Guattari), emerges uninterruptedly here and there. Years and years on end until the final text. The formula for defining univocity serves to define all the concepts that are inscribed within Deleuzean ontology – plane of immanence, body without organs, haecceities, rhizome, transcendental field, event. And there will be more. The expressive formula of the notion of ontology in Deleuze may be reduced to ‘all minus 1’ as long as it is expressed in the same differential movement of the formula of the univocity of the being. In other words, One is equal to everything that is unique, but that which is said to be unique differs, the unicity is the difference itself. And if this is the Same, it can only be the Same in its Multiplicity. First, then, is the difference, which is pure Multiplicity. Hence the immanence of the multiplicity to the one. Hence the perverse turn that makes the transcendental a field of pure immanence. Hence the transcendental empiricism hailed by Deleuze. Now, in aesthetic terms, to reduce Deleuzean expressivity to this formula does not seem much, but it is precisely NOTES ON EUROPE. The Dogmatic Sleep Proceedings. Porto, October 29-31 2019 146 following this same formula that one can argue: this singular movement of thought has an imperceptible becoming that makes it a pure multiplicity. Each stone only has a value as an autonomous element in that it is relational: internal autonomy of elements, internal heteronomy of the whole, external ontonomy of the wall, which is an archipelago and a ‘plage d’immanence’ [expanse (or zone) of immanence]… Is not sand more than a wall of loose grains, a wall fallen near the sea, that other moving mass where all the drops have one single movement for all the differentiated waves? A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings: on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess – in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return [author’s italics] (Deleuze, 1968, p. 389). If a certain movement of Deleuzean thought is taken up again, it becomes clear that the wall, lying down, becomes the path, a plane, a Möbius strip, more than a point and less than a line, more than a line and less than a surface (because it is full of holes, it contains fissures, cracks, intervals released by the absence of cement, which allows the two sides of the surface of this wall of loose stones to be reunited), a wall with fissures. A plane of composition that at times re-erects itself vertically (a white wall since verticality is white and horizontality is black) to constitute a longitude and, with a latitude, form a body that establishes the necessary cuts so that the whole ontological project avoids falling into madness, or the void into death. This wall, then, will be prudence. Michaux calls it the awakening: “... at last, with no warning, no preparation, there comes into the cage of the enormous and enormously empty edifice of bone and fog, there comes into me with no further delay a vertical surge” (Michaux, 1999, pp. 5156). Repose of the vague nomadic body that becomes a wall, like the prow of a ship so as not to founder in the smooth or striated waters of an ocean of flows. White wall, black hole. White vertical and black horizontal. Coordinates are needed to make a body. Extension and intensity. And prudence to avoid falling