From the Notebook: Ideas, essences, events
“Ideas…are the differentials of thought” (DR 169). They differenciate the self and introduce the pure and empty form of time into thought. But through differenciation they engender resonance, and thus thought itself. We cannot think (we cannot represent) an Idea. This is not a failure on our part but part of the objective structure of the Idea itself as problematic. Even in this analysis, I am representing the Idea of the Idea in order to talk about it, but the actual Idea of Idea-ness has already done its work in this operation. In this way, Ideas are eternally displaced. What if it's more than that, though? What if Ideas are displacement itself? The Idea seems to suggest to us an intimate connection with the Past…
The Idea of myself is only applied to passed (past) perceptions. The Idea of this chair I sit on is also only applied to past perceptions. Nevertheless the former Idea occupies a unique place: it is one of three Ideas which are, for Kant, the “true” Ideas – the transcendental Ideas which condition the applicability of the categories itself. (Empirical Ideas belong to the faculty of reason, too, but they are exactly only that: empirical.) Furthermore, in Kant, the Self was given a kind of priority – the Self is the primary Idea that renders possible congition. Insofar as the Self lies in the fracture of time, the Idea is the differential of thought. It is problematic because it cannot be represented (thought, known) but is behind all representations and finds a piece of itself lodged in every representation. The differential in thought, the fracture in time, is the Idea. Deleuze writes, “just as difference immediately reunites and articulates that which it fractures, so Ideas contain their dismembered moments” (DR 170). The Idea of the Self conditions thought – difference conditions thought. The Idea (the Self) is always operational in thought.
The genetic question that Maimon poses is this: how does the Self engender thought? Kant reached a remarkable conclusion, that of difference-as-Self, but by holding steadfast to Self-as-Idea as a condition (by virtue of maintaining the identity of the active synthetic unity), he fails to take the final step: the Self-as-difference. The Self-as-difference, or precisely, as-differential, is the larval self and the Self inherent in difference. Every difference has with it a Self. It isn't just enough to “relativize or pluralize the self, all the while keeping for it a simple attenuated form” (DR 78). If we say a thousand little fractures compose our being, but fail to say that the fractures are the selves, then we do not truly go farther than Kant. The truth is that to fracture is to subjectify.
Selves, thus, are the differentials of thought, they engender thought. In saying this, the Idea loses neither its transcendant nature nor its intimate connection to the Self. The differentials of thought are Ideas. Moreover, insofar as the fracture of the Self entails the pure and empty form of time, the differentials of thought entail the Event or the form of the event, the Aion, the before and the after.
How are differentials Ideas?
A differential is a coupling of two differences. As a fundamental encounter of sensibility – or, rather, the fundamental encounter that is sensibility – the differential is an intensity; it is necessarily something new. This coupling is asymmetrical: one element is marked as ‘before’ and the other as ‘after’. Because one gets marked as ‘before’, it is liable to become a point of confusion, for the pure past which operates under both elements finds in the before-element a comfortable home to disguise itself.
We may consider the two terms in the coupling contemplation-contractions of Habitus. However, as foundational elements for an upcoming new term in the series, they together represent one of the two legs of the synthesis of pure time, the other being the vertical dimension or the pure past. In other words, in themselves they are of Thanatos, but in Thanatos they are of Habitus. When Mnemosyne finds its mask in one of the two elements, something strange occurs, “all sorts of consequences follow within the system” (DR 118). The differential, having created a wound in the depths, brings together the two elements and absorbs or interiorizes their difference, it draws it off. The before-element and the after-element coincide in a resonance on one side of which is difference and on the other side of which is a quality and an extensity. Above all, Mnemosyne, fooled by her own mask, sees herself in her masked form, Eros, and begins to run on a straight track which she herself installed. It's a tragic story, her search for herself. But it's also a funny one, and all other kinds of stories, too.
The synthesis of the pure form of time as the correlate of the differential marks the intersection of the ideal with the actual, of the atemporal with the temporal. The mode of this operation is in the Event, in its ideal or atemporal form on one side and its actual or temporal form on the other. A differential, by marking one series as “superior” and the other as “inferior” (DR 234), subsumes the totality of things as becoming-Self. The Self, remember, is problematic; it is never one of the two series represented but rather immanent in Ideal form in all series. The fracture takes us from the depths (individual comets) to the surface (empty time).
Going back to Kant, if the Self is the necessary condition for thought, and the identity of the Self grants the identity of objects, then in our system, the same must apply. But because the Self has no identity other than difference, what is to become of the unity it is supposed to offer the temporal series-of-series? We can only say that it becomes problematized. In Kant's case, the identity of the Self – thus, the identity of the transcendental Idea – guaranteed each former present its own empirical identity. In Deleuze, however, if the Self is necessarily a traversal across selves, then the identity of each series becomes traversal or calculation itself; it becomes becoming. This is the momentous turn Deleuze occasions: it is the turn from essences to events. Furthermore, with the transcendental Idea now displacing itself among all series, we are forced to say that all empirical Ideas are borne by and explode from the transcendental or formidable Idea, Event, or Becoming.
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Only in representation does an event become an essence. When I say this chair is becoming-chair, I am nonetheless in the world of essences. The becoming-chair as event is instead what came before the thought, not after. Becoming-chair, moreover, is only such insofar as it participates in the global Becoming, the becoming-Idea or becoming-Self. We must be careful, however, to not posit any thing or any unity which is the object or the subject of becoming-Self. The Deleuzian Self is not the Kantian one – put differently, it is the Kantial Self taken to its final conclusions. The Deleuzian Self is exactly the Aion, the “one and the same Event” that all events communicate in (LS 53). The desirous nature of the universe can be explained in this way. Every difference is its own becoming-Self; the water, the grass, and the stars are all a little narcissistic; and is this not the most joyous thought? A true respect for the Land and its inhabitants includes an acknowledgement amidst all the solemnity that the trees and rocks are prone to their own misgivings and follies. There is a lightness to all this, the slight upward curl of philosophy's lips.
