Potestades de la Administración en la regulación del Recurso

Although the body without organs and the good object are also differ-enciators, it is the phantasm that brings together and thereby constitutes all the dimensions of sense. Because of this, ‘throughout all of that which language will designate, manifest, or signify, there will be a sexual history that will never be designated, manifested, or signifi ed in itself, but which will coexist with all the operations of language, recalling the sexual appurtenance of the formative linguistic elements’ (Deleuze 1990:

243).²² Ultimately, however, ‘the phantasm develops to the extent that the resonance induces a forced movement that goes beyond and sweeps away the basic [sexual] series . . . the forced movement of an amplitude greater than the initial movement’ (239). Thought must develop beyond its corporeal and sexual origins in order to execute a creative break with the compulsions and necessities of both the instincts and the past.

For Deleuze, this occurs when thought realizes the Nietzschean eternal return – when sexuality gives rise to the thought of difference.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze serially links his three synthe-ses of time to the components of Freud’s second model of the psyche, the eternal return being associated with the formation of the superego through a trauma that ungrounds and dissolves the ego.²³ In explaining the temporal structure of the eternal return, he argues that ‘the present is no more than an actor, an author, an agent destined to be effaced, while the past is no more than a condition operating by default’ (94).

While the past delineates the conditions for action in the present, and present action requires not only past conditions but a consolidation of the ego in relation to an ego-ideal that makes the self equal to its task (110–11), the act brings about the new by demolishing this unity:

the event and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self; . . . they turn back against the self which has become their equal and

smash it to pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth: what the self has become equal to is the unequal in itself. (89–90)

The eternal return is thus realized when a moment of unifi cation – around an ideal that is only a simulation of something higher – is used to disperse unity into difference. The Logic of Sense links this same development to the disjunctive movement of the phantasm; although the phantasm ‘fi nds its point of departure (or its author) in the phallic ego of secondary narcissism’, seeming to depend on the pre-Oedipal consolidation of the ego through identifi cation with the lost good object, within the phantasm the ego ‘is neither active nor passive and does not allow itself at any moment to be fi xed in a place, even if this place were reversible’ (Deleuze 1990: 212). Through this dissolution of the ego, the Oedipal phantasm becomes ‘the site of the eternal return’ (220). It must not be confused, however, with a similar dissolution carried out by dialectics: ‘if the ego is dissipated in it [the phantasm], it is perhaps not because of an identity of contraries, or a reversal whereby the active would become passive’ (213). Arising from disjunction, it transforms the ego into an event: ‘the individuality of the ego merges with the event of the phantasm itself, even if that which the event represents in the phantasm is understood as another individual, or rather a series of individuals through which the dissolved ego passes’ (213–14).

Freud holds that ‘A person’s own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring,’

and for this reason, ‘The ego is fi rst and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of the surface’ (Freud 1961: 25, 26). In this way the body, just like its dispersed ego, becomes an event. It is not merely a factual or real ‘thing’, but the site of a com-munication between the real and the phantastic, the corporeal and the incorporeal. The body as an event is Deleuze’s answer to the problem of traditional dualisms that his ontology of sense invites. It is neither one side of an insurmountable binary opposition nor a moment within a dialectical passage. It connects two multiplicities through a disjunctive synthesis and, as such, includes a difference that exceeds identity and representation. The body is the expression of this sense of difference, of the being of sense itself.

References

Bréhier, É. (1997), La Théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoïcisme, 9th edn, Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin.

Deleuze, G. (1988), Foucault, trans. S. Hand, London: Athlone.

Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale, New York:

Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: Athlone.

Deleuze, G. (1997), ‘Review of Jean Hyppolite’, in J. Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. L. Lawlor and A. Sen, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 191–5.

Deleuze, G. (1998), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. W. Smith and M. A.

Greco, London: Verso.

Deleuze, G. (2006), Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995, ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. A. Hodges and M. Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e).

Freud, S. (1961), ‘The Ego and the Id’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols, 19:3–66, London: Hogarth and Institute for Psycho-Analysis.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, introduced by J. N. Findlay, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hyppolite, J. (1997), Logic and Existence, trans. L. Lawlor and A. Sen, Albany, NY:

SUNY Press.

Kerslake, C. (2007), Deleuze and the Unconscious, London: Continuum.

Klein, M. (1975), Envy and Gratitude and Other Works: 1946–1963, New York:

Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence.

Klein, M. (1989), The Psycho-Analysis of Children, trans. A. Strachey, revised by H. A. Thorner and A. Strachey, London: Virago.

Klein, M. (1998), Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works: 1921–1945, intro-duced by H. Segal, London: Vintage.

Long, A. A. and D. N. Sedley (1987), The Hellenistic Philosophers, Vol. 1:

Translations and Principle Sources with Philosophical Commentary, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Marx, K. (1978), The Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd edn, ed. R. C. Tucker, New York:

W. W. Norton.

Nietzsche, F. (1974), The Gay Science, with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage.

Plato (1961), The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Widder, N. (2009), ‘From Negation to Disjunction in a World of Simulacra: Deleuze and Melanie Klein’, Deleuze Studies, 3:2, pp. 207–30.

Žižek, S. (2004), Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, New York: Routledge.

Notes

1. With respect to the expressive character of being, Nietzsche writes: ‘How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without

“sense,” does not become “nonsense”; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation – that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect. . . . But I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner’ (Nietzsche 1974:

§374).

2. This is the basis of Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Phenomenology: ‘Hegel having posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness, the estranged object – the

estranged essential reality of man – is nothing but consciousness, the thought of estrangement merely – estrangement’s abstract and therefore empty and unreal expression, negation. The annulment of the alienation is therefore like-wise nothing but an abstract, empty annulment of that empty abstraction – the negation of the negation. The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectifi cation is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativity – an abstraction which is again fi xed as such and thought of as an independent activity – as sheer activity. Because this so-called negativity is nothing but the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content can in consequence be merely a formal content begotten by abstraction from all content. As a result there are general, abstract forms of abstraction pertaining to every content and on that account indifferent to, and, consequently, valid for, all content – the thought-forms or logical categories torn from real mind and from real nature’

(Marx 1978: 122).

3. ‘Matter unites the following two characteristics: it allows a concept which is absolutely identical in as many exemplars as there are ‘times’ or ‘cases’; and it prevents this concept from being further specifi ed by virtue of its natural poverty, or its natural state of unconsciousness or alienation. Matter, therefore, is the identity of spirit – in other words, of the concept, but in the form of an alienated concept, without self-consciousness and outside itself’ (Deleuze 1990:

285–6).

4. This image of thought is worked out most extensively in Deleuze 1990 (ch. 3).

5. Deleuze leaves behind the language of simulacra in later writings, declaring it to be ‘all but worthless’ (2006: 362). None the less, he certainly retains the positive multiplicity that was designated by the term.

6. All further references to Plato’s dialogues are taken from Plato (1961) and cite the dialogue, where appropriate, and the Stephanus pagination.

7. Some hold Plato to have become disenchanted with the theory of Ideas in the Parmenides and later dialogues, but they can also be interpreted as an explora-tion of the theory’s necessary condiexplora-tions. These condiexplora-tions require rejecting a strict separation between being and becoming – hence when it is upheld in Theaetetus, knowledge is impossible, but when it is denied in the Sophist, the false philosopher can be defi ned – and, as seen in Philebus (15b–18b), an ordered and denumerable plurality that mediates between the One and the Many.

8. See Deleuze 1994: ch. 4.

9. See Seneca, Simplicius, and Galen in Long and Sedley 1987: 176–7.

10. See Cicero and Aetius in Long and Sedley 1987: 237–8.

11. See Diogenes Laertius in Long and Sedley 1987: 198.

12. ‘Ces résultats de l’action des êtres, que les Stoïciens ont été peut-être les premiers à remarquer sous cette forme, c’est ce que nous appellerions aujourd’hui des faits ou des événements: concept bâtard qui n’est ni celui d’un être, ni d’une de ses propriétés, mais ce qui est dit ou affi rmé de l’être’ (Bréhier 1997: 12).

13. See Plutarch in Long and Sedley 1987: 299.

14. In contrast to the chronological time of bodies, incorporeal events ‘are not living presents, but infi nites: the unlimited Aion, the becoming which divides itself infi nitely in past and future and always eludes the present’ (Deleuze 1990: 5).

15. ‘In accordance with Heidegger’s ontological intuition, difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator . . . by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition’ (Deleuze 1994: 117).

16. Deleuze’s relationship to Klein has been left virtually unexamined, despite the fact that his engagement with her work takes up some fi fty pages of The Logic of Sense. It is completely ignored by Žižek (2004), who treats the book as a Lacanian work when the engagement with Klein is the most obvious piece of evidence that it is not. It is also ignored by Kerslake’s (2007) book-length study of Deleuze and the unconscious. Against this trend, see Widder (2009).

17. See Klein 1998: 86, 211; also Klein 1975: 83, 115, 137–8.

18. Deleuze makes this statement in an analysis of Foucault, but it equally applicable to his reading of Klein.

19. For Klein, urine and faeces serve as poisonous weapons for the child to attack and destroy the bad in the paranoid-schizoid position.

20. ‘It is no longer a matter of the mechanisms of introjection and projection, but of identifi cation. . . . The depressive split is between the two poles of identifi cation, that is, the identifi cation of the ego with the internal objects and its identifi cation with the object of heights’ (Deleuze 1990: 192).

21. Deleuze here rejects the Kleinian ascription of phantasms to the pre-Oedipal positions, holding the phantasm to arise only with desexualization and symboli-zation, not prior to them (Deleuze 1990: 215–16).

22. Deleuze maintains that propositions relate directly to things by denoting states of affairs, which may be true or false, possible or impossible; they relate to subjects by manifesting the intentions of a speaking ‘I’; and they relate to con-cepts by signifying universal concon-cepts. Sense, however, cannot be subsumed under these relations, since a proposition has sense even if it cannot be linked to a speaking subject and even if it signifi es an incoherent concept (i.e. square circle), and since propositions denoting opposing states of affairs (‘God is’ and

‘God is not’) can have the same sense. For these reasons, Deleuze calls sense, as a disjunctive synthesis that operates outside these orders of identity, the fourth dimension of propositions and the dimension that allows the others to function (see Deleuze 1990: 12–22).

23. See Deleuze 1994: 96–121.