Integration and Difference

“An important book for continental philosophy.”

Professor David F. Hoinski
“One of today’s most original thinkers.”
Professor Vernon W. Cisney
“A tremendously exciting and generative book.”
Professor Roderi Main
“A deep and poetic rumination.”
Professor Barbara Jenkins
“Brilliant.”
Peter Salmon
“A hugely stimulating read.”
Professor Mark Saban

is groundbreaking work synthesizes concepts from thirteen crucial

philosophers and psyologists, relating how the ancient problem of
opposites has been opening to an integration whi not only conserves
differentiation but enacts it, especially through the integration of myth into
the dialectic.
Weaving a fascinating narrative that ‘thinks with’ the complex encounters
of theorists from Baru Spinoza, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedri Nietzse, and
William James to Alfred North Whitehead, C. G. Jung, Gilles Deleuze, and
Isabelle Stengers, this book uniquely performs the convergence of
continental philosophy, pragmatism, depth psyology, and constructivist
‘postmodern’ theory as a complement to the trajectory culminating in
Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction.
 is is an important book for professionals and academics working across
the humanities and social sciences, particularly for continental theorists and
depth psyologists interested in the construction of a novel epo aer the
modern.

Grant Maxwell is an editor of the Archai journal and he holds a PhD from
the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. He is the author of
multiple books including The Dynamics of Transformation: Tracing an
Emerging World View, and he has wrien for Deleuze and Guattari Studies,
the American Philosophical Association blog, American Songwriter
magazine, and the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture.
Philosophy & Psyoanalysis Book Series
Series Editor: JON MILLS

Philosophy & Psychoanalysis is dedicated to current developments and

cuing-edge resear in the philosophical sciences, phenomenology,
hermeneutics, existentialism, logic, semiotics, cultural studies, social
criticism, and the humanities that engage and enri psyoanalytic thought
through philosophical rigor. With the philosophical turn in psyoanalysis
comes a new era of theoretical resear that revisits past paradigms while
invigorating new approaes to theoretical, historical, contemporary, and
applied psyoanalysis. No subject or discipline is immune from
psyoanalytic reflection within a philosophical context including
psyology, sociology, anthropology, politics, the arts, religion, science,
culture, physics, and the nature of morality. Philosophical approaes to
psyoanalysis may stimulate new areas of knowledge that have conceptual
and applied value beyond the consulting room reflective of greater society at
large. In the spirit of pluralism, Philosophy & Psychoanalysis is open to any
theoretical sool in philosophy and psyoanalysis that offers novel,
solarly, and important insights in the way we come to understand our
world.

Titles in this series:

Psyoanalysis and the Mind-Body Problem

Jon Mills

Jung’s Alemical Philosophy

Psye and the Mercurial Play of Image and Idea
Stanton Marlan
Integration and Difference
Constructing a Mythical Dialectic
Grant Maxwell
Integration and Difference
Constructing a Mythical Dialectic

Grant Maxwell
Cover image: Orange by Christian Kurt Ebert

First published 2022

by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
605 ird Avenue, New York, NY 10158

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2022 Grant Maxwell

e right of Grant Maxwell to be identified as author of this work has been

asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, meanical, or other means, now
known or hereaer invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-032-04987-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-04985-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-19549-8 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
TO GINNY, ALWAYS
Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Turning Deconstruction on Its Head

1  e Final Writing of an Epo: Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology

2  Freedom of Mind: Baru Spinoza’s Ethics

3  Well-Founded Fictions: Gofried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Monadology

4  e Life of the Whole: G.W.F. Hegel’s On Scientific Cognition

5  God-Positing Potencies: F.W.J. Selling’s Berlin Lectures

6  Something Higher an Any Reconciliation: Friedri Nietzse’s The

Birth of Tragedy

7  An Integrated Affair: William James’ Pragmatism

8  A True Work of Integration: Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution

9  e Process of Integration: Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and

Reality

10  A Widening of Consciousness rough Integration: C.G. Jung’s

Mysterium Coniunctionis
11  Integrating Myth Into the Dialectic: Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and
Repetition

12  Disintegrated Integration: James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology

13  e estion of Integration: Concluding with Isabelle Stengers

Works Cited
Index
Anowledgments

I would like to express my profound gratitude to the colleagues who have

contributed in some way to this book’s composition, and to my friends and
family whose love and support has helped to make the writing process a
highly enjoyable experience despite the collective difficulties we have all
been immersed in these last few years. ank you to Taylor Adkins, Charles
Alunni, Raael Anderson-Was, Frida Beman, Eli Bortz, Riard Bright,
Kent Bye, John Campbell, Cooper Cherry, Vern Cisney, Don Curren, Mark
Dean, Tod Desmond, Jaie DiSalvo, Kevin Drost, Simon Duffy, Russell
Duvernoy, Susannah Frearson, Dwight Gaudet, Béa Gonzalez, Will Grissom,
David Henderson, David Hoinski, Ken Jedding, Barbara Jenkins, Sean Kelly,
Jeremy Liebman, Roderi Main, Tim McKague, Sam Miey, Jon Mills,
Hellmut Monz, Kelly Nezat, Laurent Noale, Alexis O’Brien, Nathan
Oseroff-Spicer, John Protevi, Jason etel, Joshua Ramey, Katie Randall,
Joan Riardson, Mark Saban, Peter Salmon, Mahew Segall, Ike Sharpless,
Mahew Stoulil, Becca Tarnas, Ri Tarnas, Dan Tyler, Stephanie von Behr,
and Sco Zimmerle. And, as always, thank you to my family: Ginny
Maxwell, Mason Maxwell, Dylan Maxwell, Dan Orsborn, Carol Orsborn,
Jody Orsborn, Don Edwards, Susan Edwards, and Kiy Edwards. ank
you, finally, to Deleuze and Guattari Studies and Interalia Magazine for
permission to republish material in modified form, and to Christian Kurt
Ebert for permission to use his painting Orange on the cover.
This is the problem of the solidarity of the universe. The classical doctrines of
universals and particulars, of subject and predicate, of individual substances
not present in other individual substances, of the externality of relations,
alike render this problem incapable of solution. The answer given by the
organic philosophy is the doctrine of prehensions, involved in concrescent
integrations… . The process of integration, which lies at the very heart of the
concrescence, is the urge imposed on the concrescent unity of that universe.

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality1

Alchemy is the herald of a still-unconscious drive for maximal integration

which seems to be reserved for a distant future… . The question then arises
as to how all these divergent factors, previously kept apart by apparently
insuperable incompatibilities, will behave, and what the ego is going to do
about it… . The sight of its darkness is itself an illumination, a widening of
consciousness through integration of the hitherto unconscious components of
the personality… . Above all, consciousness experiences a widening of its
horizon.

C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis2

Dialectic discovers its true method in division. Division overcomes this

duality and integrates myth into the dialectic; it makes myth an element of
the dialectic itself… . Each differenciation is a local integration or a local
solution which then connects with others in the overall solution or the global
integration… . The act of individuation consists not in suppressing the
problem, but in integrating the elements of the disparateness into a state of
coupling which ensures its internal resonance.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition3

Notes
1. Whitehead, Process, 56, 228.
2. Jung, Mysterium, 205, 253, 290.
3. Deleuze, Difference, 61, 211, 246.
Introduction
Turning Deconstruction on Its Head

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-1

Since the last few decades of the twentieth century, the deconstruction
enacted by Jacques Derrida has been a dominant force in American
humanities and social sciences, oen explicitly, but more oen implicitly
defining the directions and limits of resear.1 Even beyond deconstruction’s
direct influence, the prevailing tendency has been toward critical
problematizing, although especially in the years since the turn of the
twenty-first century, theorists from various disciplines have sought to move
beyond the exclusivity of a primarily negative approa to the production of
knowledge to generate more explicitly constructive modes of thought.
Nevertheless, deconstruction and the more general mode of thought it
exemplifies still reign at the heart of intellectual culture in the West because
no subsequent movement under a unified nomination with a comparably
potent aesthetic allure has yet captured the aention of the guardians and
producers of knowledge en masse, though an urgent collective desire for
su a fresh dispensation, however multifarious, is evident.2
A novel mode of thought that integrates essential insights of
deconstruction but turns them on their head, inverting those insights, and
bringing them into intimate relation with other conceptual domains to
produce new ways of knowing, is showing the early signs of emerging into
broad academic awareness.3 As has oen been suggested, deconstruction
was prefigured in essential ways by the Sophists in ancient Greece.4 But the
approa whi I am calling integration, a term derived especially from
Gofried Wilhelm Leibniz, William James, Henri Bergson, Alfred North
Whitehead, C.G. Jung, Gilles Deleuze, James Hillman, and Isabelle Stengers,
an approa always complexly intertwined with differentiation, also has a
long history. e two modes, deconstructive and integrative, can be
conceived as complementary, and I will propose that deconstruction can be
understood as a necessary element in a more encompassing mode of
thought, a moment in a more expansive process of becoming.
e first apter aempts to distill essential insights of deconstruction as
expressed in Derrida’s 1967 book Of Grammatology, suggesting that
Derrida’s thought is deeply resonant with the other twentieth century
theorists to whom apters are devoted, though he primarily expresses the
negative valences of the positive conceptual complexes traced below. e
subsequent apters are ea devoted to one, or in some cases several,
foundational works from twelve other theorists ranging from the
seventeenth century until the twenty-first century who have expressed
various aspects of this mode of thought, whi is ripe for emergence into
broad discourse as a definitive step beyond the necessary deconstruction of
one-sided, hierarical modern metanarratives, from Baru Spinoza,
Gofried Wilhelm Leibniz, G.W. F. Hegel, F.W.J. Selling, Friedri
Nietzse, and William James to Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead,
C.G. Jung, Gilles Deleuze, James Hillman, and Isabelle Stengers. I cannot
hope to be even remotely comprehensive, either in the oice of theorists or
in reference to ea theorist’s body of work.5 But I will offer that there is an
underlying coherence of approa among these thinkers, despite many
significant – indeed constitutive – differences, that provides a theoretical
orientation for moving beyond the still-deconstructive quality of mu of
contemporary academia, whi oen serves to enforce a narrowness of
concern despite the liberating quality of Derrida’s project, while retaining
and recontextualizing the undeniably potent, rigorous, and useful
deconstructive mode forged during the height of postmodernity, perhaps
especially in the United States, over the last few decades.
Although the readings performed below adhere closely to these texts, this
work is not primarily a history of philosophy, but rather a “thinking with”6
inspired by Stengers’ Thinking With Whitehead and Deleuze’s books on
individual philosophers (Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzse, Bergson). In fact,
Deleuze has said that he sees “no difference between writing a book on the
history of philosophy and a book of philosophy,”7 a provocation to whi I
have sought to do justice. More than a history, this book can be conceived as
a kind of staging in a philosophical theater, in whi the theorists under
consideration are playing out their problematic and variable relational
dramas, ea enacting a distinct role in an oen obscure and enigmatic
narrative.8 e problem whose history this book stages, a problem
coextensive with the trajectory initiated at the dawn of Western philosophy
in Heraclitus, is what to do about opposed, conflicting, incompatible,
paradoxical, or otherwise incommensurable truths, modes of thought,
values, judgments, inclinations, and affects. is is a recurring question that
the texts explicated in this work have sought to address in increasingly
subtle and profound ways, from Spinozan parallelism, Leibnizian mathesis
universalis, Hegelian dialectic, Selling’s positive philosophy, Nietzse’s

evocation of “something higher than any reconciliation,”9 and Jamesian

pragmatism to Bergson’s intuitive method, Whitehead’s concrescent
integration, Jungian and Hillmanian psyological integration, and the
constructivist and integrative expressions of Deleuze and Stengers.
e framing of this project as “turning deconstruction on its head” can be
conceived as an appropriation of the way in whi Hegel’s dialectic was
appropriated by Karl Marx with rather different intentions to those whi
animated Hegelian logic, Marx claiming to have turned the dialectic ba on
its feet (having previously been “standing on its head”10). And mu like the
idealism of Hegel and his German contemporaries Kant, Fite, and
Selling, pragmatism, despite the protestations of James’ many devotees,
has taken on a different, and mu simpler meaning than James and Peirce
originally intended, so that political debates are oen framed in terms of
facile and reductive versions of these two terms. Although I agree with
James on most subjects, I am pushing against him in my somewhat
heterodox suggestion that the core mode of thought aracteristic of
pragmatism is ultimately a different inflection of the dialectic as, like most of
the post-Hegelian philosophers discussed in these pages, James was very
critical of Hegel, finding precious lile common ground with the man who
had been the most influential philosopher in the century in whi James
began his work.11 However, as John Dewey observed in a leer to James
aer reading The Principles of Psychology, “parts of it were perhaps more
Hegelian than James might wish to admit.”12
ese are the kinds of theoretical and terminological concerns that have
rendered aempts to assert an underlying coherence in the work of these
theorists and others problematic. However, I will suggest that the difficulty
in discerning a mode that potentially subsumes and surpasses
deconstruction is itself largely a result of the oen implicit dominance of
deconstruction. In contrast, I will seek to demonstrate that the work of all of
these theorists has contributed to a stream of thought, still oen
subterranean and difficult to locate, whi discerns that every positive
concept, every claim that does not explicitly or implicitly deny or negate
some other opposing conception, is necessary for the production of an
increasingly expansive, and finely differentiated, mode of relation for
constructively negotiating the potentialities and constraints of process. And
while this suggestion may appear fairly straightforward, determining whi
claims made by any mode of thought are positive and whi are negative
can be troublesome to disentangle, as ideas and their opposites must evolve
in tension, and through many compromise formations of difference, for
novel concepts to emerge. Nevertheless, this mode of relation, when pursued
with assiduous care and rigorous discernment, can lead to some startling
conclusions about the world and our place in it. Ea of the theorists whose
work is examined in the following pages has contributed essential insights to
this multivalent mode of integrating apparently incommensurable entities,
an integration whi not only conserves differentiation but enacts it. In a
recursive operation, the integration of these disparate, and sometimes even
opposed, theorists directly puts into practice the very integrative mode that
they have articulated in its different inflections.
Although this mode itself is more significant than the name by whi it is
called, the naming of a concept nevertheless plays a large role in
determining its fate, as there are many historical and contextual factors that
can enable or inhibit the passage of a word into various interconnected
discursive streams. I am emphasizing the word integration, not only because
it directly answers the lexical force and appeal of the deconstructive
denomination, but because other, more established contenders, including the
Hegelian dialectic and Jamesian pragmatism, though still eminently useful,
have become ossified with time, and are inextricably associated with the
historically bound complexities of their origins. Following James, who called
pragmatism “a new name for some old ways of thinking”13 (though he
claims not to have liked the term osen by his elder colleague Peirce), I am
suggesting an even newer name for this mode of thought (though variations
of the word “integrate” are employed more or less copiously by most of the
theorists below, as well as many other theorists) and, in the process,
aempting to integrate pragmatism with other, apparently disparate streams
of thought, including Hegelian ones.
Constructivism is another good word for describing the mode traced in
these pages, whose virtue is directly to contrast with the deconstructive
designation, though, like idealism and pragmatism, it has generally come to
be understood in a greatly reduced form relative to the full complexity in
whi Deleuze and Stengers have employed the term; the most pervasive
caricature of “postmodernism” is that reality is purely a social construct,
whi is a drastic oversimplification of what these constructivist theorists
actually think, and whi Stengers recognizes as a polemical “curse that
weighs upon constructivism.”14 is word is now oen erroneously
associated with a complete solipsistic relativism, so that rather than
aempting belatedly to disentangle the tenical use of this term from its
popular caricatures, it may be more efficacious to emphasize a novel term, at
least in this context, that may finally serve to carry us past the fixed
oppositions aracteristic of the culture and science wars of the nineties, in
whi we oen still seem to be embroiled. Furthermore, it might be
suggested that any lexical modifications of modernism, su as
postmodernism (even a constructive variety15) or metamodernism,16 or of
materialism, namely new materialism17 (though excellent work has certainly
been produced under these designations), are analogous to the epicyclic
corrections that hoped to maintain the Earth’s centrality in the cosmos by
adding ever-more-elaborate refinements to this primary premise, and whi
Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo swept away over the course of the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries.
e derivation of the term integration from Whitehead in particular
provides a satisfying parallel to Derrida’s derivation of deconstruction from
Heidegger (as a translation of Destruktion, whi is not merely
“destruction”18), eoing Steven Shaviro’s speculative reimagining of
twentieth-century philosophy, in whi he provocatively describes an
alternate scenario for whi Whitehead has been the dominant influence on
continental philosophy rather than Heidegger.19 By contrast, difference is
perhaps the most representative term of postmodernism, a putative
movement whose defining aracteristic is that it paradoxically resists
definition, as this term perhaps more accurately describes a condition or an
era rather than a movement.20 As Stengers observes, “Fren-speaking
onlookers” to American conversations about postmodernism are oen
“perplexed” in relation to “the very possibility of bringing together Gilles
Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, Miel Foucault and Jacques Lacan under the
same label,”21 as these theorists are all very different, despite certain
similarities of style and concern, whi perhaps have more to do with their
nationality than with some dubious devotion to a coherent sool of
thought. Nevertheless, the two primary representatives of what is generally
referred to, in English, as postmodern thought discussed in these pages,
Derrida and Deleuze, both extensively employ the term difference, both
philosophers using the word in titles of major works. However, as Vernon
Cisney offers, although both philosophers propound a differential ontology,
Derrida’s is primarily negative while Deleuze’s is primarily positive.22 For
both Deleuze and Derrida, difference is the relationality from whi the
world is constructed, but for Derrida, the différance whi constitutes
thought is imprisoned within the autoerotic enclosure of textuality whose
outside is unthinkable, and thus he enacts a refusal or effacement of
metaphysics, while for Deleuze, difference is the groundless ground of
becoming, a metaphysical constructivism whi liberates thought into vast
and open domains of novel creation.
Far from the “reactive integration”23 aracteristic of Catholic integralism
and other totalizing regimes, though perhaps not as far from the active
integrations of biology, sociology, and engineering, the term integration, like
difference, is partially derived, in all of the theorists discussed in these pages
who employ these words, from the integral and differential calculus
independently invented by Leibniz and Newton in different forms, though it
is significant that Newton began his discovery with the differential calculus
and Leibniz with the integral calculus (both of whi he named), given that
Newtonian physics, while undeniably efficacious, has come to epitomize
atomistic reductionism, whereas Leibniz’s philosophical thought is a clear
precursor to the conceptual form of integration traced in these pages. While
the calculus, in both its integral and differential forms, is generally
considered purely quantitative, breaking a curve or an area up into
miniscule parts and then summing them together to produce a discontinuous
description of continuous, nondifferentiable phenomena, Leibniz’s version of
the calculus, distinguished from Newton’s particularly by the concept of the
infinitesimal, whi Newton initially affirmed but subsequently discarded in
favor of limits, is intimately bound up with his metaphysics; for the stream
of thought of whi Leibniz is a primary initiator, mathematical and
conceptual integration can be understood as more than merely analogous.
Although Derrida, “the Great Deconstructor”24 as Stengers quips (without
explicitly mentioning Derrida), is ronologically situated aer Hegel, and
he positions himself as something like a deepening of Hegel through the
intermediary of Heidegger,25 it seems that Derrida carried the impulse
mediated by Hegel into the vortex of a rationality against exclusive
rationalism, though this carrying has served a necessary and important
historical function, whereas Hegel is affectively beyond Derrida. While
anowledging the legitimate criticisms of Hegel leveled by most of the
post-Hegelian theorists below, it can perhaps be recognized that Hegel’s
expansive openness to transformation and becoming is mu closer to all of
the other thinkers discussed in these pages, including Deleuze, than to
Derrida. Derrida carries the traditional metaphysics to their extreme logical
conclusion in a self-deconstruction, but what he rejects, whi is perhaps
Hegel’s greatest contribution, is the presentiment of a way beyond not only
his own philosophical system, but beyond his epo, through the dialectical
reconciliation of opposites, whi it may now be possible to resituate in
broader terms, thanks in part to Derrida, as the integration of difference, or
as differentiating integration. And although Deleuze convincingly
demonstrates, partially through his readings of Spinoza, Nietzse, and
Bergson, that the Hegelian dialectic alone is insufficient for this epoal task,
it can be understood as an essential moment in this self-overcoming of
process.
Like all of the other theorists discussed below who thought aer Hegel,
Deleuze has served significantly to deepen and complicate the concept of
integration, providing a definitive opening from binarity, even binarity
reconciled by a third entity, to a more expansive relationality conceivable in
numerical, geometrical, and topological terms.26 Derrida and Deleuze, whom
Lyotard aptly designated “the two geniuses”27 of the generation that rose to
philosophical dominance in the sixties in France, can be understood as
writing at a liminal border between two epos, “suspended between two
histories,”28 as Stengers writes, though whereas Derrida sees no viable way
beyond the logocentric epo’s closure, Deleuze provides an opening, a ri
in the modern horizon, through whi we can glimpse the exponentially
wider world beyond that enclosure. Deleuze thus performs a central role in
this narrative, enacting the forward-looking face of Janus, the two-faced
Roman god, to Derrida’s baward-looking face. For integration, what is
important in both Derrida and Deleuze, as in Hegel and Selling, or
numerous other dyads, is not what they deny, but what they affirm, whi
in Derrida’s case is the importance of the negative itself, a negativity beyond
the negative,29 and in Deleuze’s case, among many other things, is the
affirmation of difference, and thus the incompleteness and openness to
transformation of any mode of thought, including the dialectic.
Although I am positioning Deleuze as a constructive complement to
Derrida’s primarily negative deconstruction, as Deleuze (along with Félix
Guaari, and followed by Stengers) explicitly positions philosophy as “a
constructivism” whi creates novel concepts,30 I will suggest that Derrida
also has something essential to offer Deleuze. In my reading, Deleuze’s only
major “blind spot,”31 to employ Derrida’s term, is his reading of Hegel,
whi, although it contains an important critique and extension of Hegel,
goes too far in a sustained argument whi can be shown to deconstruct
itself. And, without going into the details of this complex operation at this
stage, the deconstruction of this one aspect of Deleuze’s work may serve to
liberate the vast multiplicity of concepts he creates from this extraordinarily
complex weight, this weighty complex, whi in turn may allow Deleuze’s
thought fully to inhabit a novel mode aer the “postmodern” rather than
remaining with one foot in this liminal border and one in an emerging
mode, necessarily carrying the deconstructive mode as a constitutive
element in this novel mode’s emergence.
In turn, I will suggest that, although Derrida is affectively prohibited from
entering this promised novel domain, he sacrifices this possibility in order
ultimately to serve as the “conceptual persona”32 who provides the element
missing from Deleuze’s thought, offering the gi of a potential integration of
Deleuze with that whi he denies, namely the Hegelian negative, whi
may constitute a necessary step in allowing us collectively to make the
transition into this novel domain, this “new earth,”33 rather than
ambivalently lingering at the threshold. And I will further suggest that
Whitehead, Jung, Hillman, and Stengers particularly provide essential
insights for moving beyond the duality epoally engaged by both Deleuze
and Derrida, their modes of thought resonant with Deleuze, and especially
with a Deleuze liberated by deconstruction from his most subtle feers to
enter fully into the novel mode that he did so mu to render thinkable.
Derrida writes in his moving eulogy for Deleuze in 1995 that “Deleuze
remains no doubt, despite so many dissimilarities, the one to whom I have
always considered myself closest among all of this ‘generation’ ” and that,
aer Deleuze’s death, “I will have to wander all alone in this long
conversation we should have had together.” Perhaps the project undertaken
in these pages can assist in carrying this conversation forward, in
integrating the deeply complementary modes of thought expressed so
brilliantly by these two philosophers, an integration constituted in an
affirmation of their differential relations.34
In a lecture in 1987, Deleuze tells his audience of filmmakers, with a
vaguely amused shrug, that, like cinema, “philosophy also tells stories”35 (a
“fiction-philosophy,” “story-repetition,” “legending,” or “story-telling of the
people to come,” as he writes elsewhere36). Similarly, Stengers writes that
“the Whiteheadian adventure” is “a storytelling.”37 In fact, Logos, a term
whi resides at the heart of the Western philosophical tradition, is derived
from the verb legein, one of whose meanings is to recount, as in the telling
of a legendary tale. Even Descartes, the supreme rationalist, described his
Discourse on Method, arguably the founding text of modern philosophy, as a

“story” or “fable” in whi the core of his method is to “pretend.”38 e

“convoluted story”39 I will recount in the following pages, with as lile
pretense as possible, is about the development of a conceptual complex
whi, over the course of millennia, has been expressed again and again in
increasingly subtle fabulations, refined and deepened by generation aer
generation of theorists until, in our time, we find this complex poised to
emerge from its long gestation into the light of day.
Aer narrating the Hegelian peak of the primarily oppositional form of
the dialectic, whi began with Heraclitus and Plato, as well as
differentiating two other essential threads complexly interwoven in the later
apters – the “freedom of mind” aracteristic of Spinozan immanence and
Leibnizian mathesis universalis – the majority of the pages below compose
the story of how the oppositional dialectic has been opening to a pluralist
multiplicity of dynamisms. is opening began in earnest with Selling’s
theory of mythological potencies and Nietzse’s will to potency in the
eternal return, passing through Jamesian, Bergsonian, and Whiteheadian
speculatively empirical pluralist constructions beyond exclusivist
rationalism and materialism, and culminating with Deleuze’s conception of
a more profound dialectic differentially integrated with an obscure and
enigmatic expression of the gods of Hellenic polytheism. is mythical
dialectic is deeply, and perhaps unexpectedly, resonant with the work of
Jung, whose sustained influence on Deleuze (as well as on other Fren
philosophers like Gaston Baelard and Gilbert Simondon, who both also
influenced Deleuze) has been under-anowledged. Deleuze’s novel
dialectical conception, both with and without Guaari, is also strongly
resonant with Hillman’s aretypal polytheism whi dissolves the
totalitarian monocentric ego in a deeper integration, and with Stengers’
Leibnizian, Whiteheadian, and Deleuzean evocations of a cosmopolitical
peace whi enables not only a reclaiming of animism, but perhaps also of
polytheism.
Notes
1. Keller, Process, 56; Cusset, Theory, 77.
2. Salmon, Event, 272.
3. Deleuze, Negotiations, 165.
4. Badiou, Conditions, 20.
5. Hegel, Logic, 21.
6. Stengers, Thinking, 185, 242.
7. Deleuze and Parnet, L’Abécédaire, 94; Cf. Deleuze, Difference, xv.
8. Deleuze, Desert, 144.
9. Nietzse, Zarathustra, 112.
10. Marx, Capital I, 103.
11. Cusset, Theory, 97.
12. Menand, Metaphysical, 359.
13. James, Pragmatism.
14. Stengers, Thinking, 19; Stengers, Catastrophic, 112.
15. See Griffin et al., Founders; Keller, Process, 2–3.
16. See Van Den Akker, Metamodernism.
17. See MacLure, “New Materialisms.”
18. Salmon, Event, 129; Peeters, Derrida, 160.
19. Shaviro, Without, ix. ere are many resonances between Heidegger
and the theorists discussed in this book, but although I recognize his
importance, I have decided not to give my primary time and aention
to a Nazi, however brilliant (Salmon, Event, 56; Blaner, Heidegger’s,
7).
20. Lyotard, Condition.
21. Stengers, “Beyond,” 235.
22. Cisney, Deleuze, 143.
23. Deleuze, Two, 28.
24. Stengers, Thinking, 2.
25. Inwood, Heidegger, 114.
26. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 17.
27. Dosse, Intersecting, 354.
28. Stengers, Catastrophic, 17.
29. Derrida, Writing, 390n4.
30. Deleuze and Guaari, Philosophy? 35; Deleuze, Negotiations, 25;
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 146, 280.
31. Derrida, Grammatology, 164.
32. Deleuze and Guaari, Philosophy? 10.
33. Deleuze and Guaari, Philosophy? 101.
34. Derrida, “Wander.”
35. Deleuze, Two, 314.
36. Deleuze, Desert, 157; Deleuze, Difference, 62; Deleuze, Negotiations,
125–6; Deleuze, Cinema 2, 223.
37. Stengers, Thinking, 516. See Stengers, Another, 156.
38. Descartes, Discourse, 3, 18.
39. Deleuze, Logic, xiv.
Chapter 1
e Final Writing of an Epo
Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-2

Derrida refuses to call deconstruction a method in 1967’s Of Grammatology,

preferring to nominate the mode of thought he offers as “a theoretical
matrix”1 whi performs the self-deconstruction of texts. And this denial of
methodology from the outset is aracteristic of Derridean deconstruction: It
declines to be defined, resists simple meanings, and problematizes the
implicit dominance of logocentrism, the privileging of phonetic writing with
its system of logical relations, inscribing the particular modes of analyzing,
explicating, reading, and interpreting aracteristic of the “West” and its
most fundamental metaphysical presuppositions. is problematizing of the
implicit privileging of these logocentric modes of thought has been a
crucially important project for the Western mind to undertake in its
development (if we understand this figure of the Western mind, like all
identities, as a real, but limited, fiction), though the deconstructive mode
problematizes a coherent movement of cultural development, bringing into
question the traditional metaphysical progression from nonlife to animality
to consciousness, whi allows for the deepening of this figural movement
by other theorists, Bergson for instance (though he wrote before Derrida)
describing a multiplicity of radiating trajectories rather than a single
developmental line. However, now that the deconstructive project has
outgrown its initial allure, one might notice that deconstruction, while
playing a vitally necessary role in clearing away the oen unexamined,
implicit, and pervasive biases culminating in modernity, has taught
intellectual culture to take a suspicious and problematizing stance toward
any larger coherence, toward any Lyotardian metanarrative for fear that it
might be used to exclude, dominate, or marginalize.2
But ironically, the very urge to seek a more expansively generative
narrative has effectively been excluded and marginalized by deconstruction,
so that Derrida summarizes his “final intention in this book” as “to make
enigmatic what one thinks one understands” about the traditional
metaphysics of presence, aempting “to produce, oen embarrassing myself
in the process, the problems of critical reading.”3 While there is certainly
value in this kind of enigmatic and embarrassed problematizing, and
although Derrida gestures toward an opening to “ ‘positive’ discovery”4
intimately intertwined with his deconstruction of texts, whi is not a mere
doubling reproduction, the activity undertaken in this work is nevertheless
almost purely negative, delineating a problematic field, admiedly a
pervasive and ancient one, without offering a way to move beyond that
problematic situation toward deeper questions. It seeks to break the bonds of
the dominance of wrien words, untying araic constraints built into the
semiotic systems through whi we construct our identities and the world,
leaving an open field of loose threads. However, deconstruction does
nothing to populate this void, to weave those disparate threads into a novel
tapestry of symbolic coherence through whi a dynamic and generative
story can be unfurled, though its virtue is that it avoids filling this la with
a static plenum.5 It is a metanarrative against metanarratives, and Derrida is
the messiah of the end of monocentric messianic consciousness, an
impossibly paradoxical and problematic stance.6
e story Derrida tells is about the closure of a logocentric epo, whi
he describes as defined by a metaphysical tendency streting from the pre-
Socratics through Plato, Leibniz, Hegel, and even Heidegger, who performs a
cancelation of the traditional conceptions of being and truth that Derrida
conceives as “the final writing of an epo,” whi he evokes as “also the
first writing,” though of what he does not tell us. is conception applies
perhaps even more completely to Derrida himself, as he generally esews
gesturing toward a novel mode that might emerge phoenix-like from the
ashes of the old mode, almost exclusively dwelling with the risk of “falling
ba within what is being deconstructed,” even as he exposes the workings
of the textual maine while precariously clinging to the inside of its still-
enclosing outer shell, squinting intently, lips pursed, into its ultimately
complex mainations. Deconstruction dismantles the logocentric structures
from the inside,7 Derrida positioning himself liminally within the mainic
border, facing into the depths of the assemblage while the shell begins to
cra, like an egg, behind his ba, just past the edge of his vision. Derrida
describes this deconstructive moment, whi he associates especially with
Nietzse and Heidegger, as “a trembling proper to all post-Hegelian
aempts and to this passage between two epos,” though we can discern a
half-century later that Derrida himself is the peak expression of this subtly
embarrassed and eloquently terrified trembling. e problematizing reading
produced by Derrida is, as he suggests, an extremely difficult, but necessary,
liberation from the overwhelming gravity of the past, and the widespread
embrace of this exhortation toward freedom from the existing categories of
thought in the last half-century should be celebrated as a triumph of truly
critical thinking in the academy, an affirmation of the obligation for
theorists to question every assumption, to take nothing for granted.8
However, as I will suggest in the apters that follow, there is one
fundamental assumption, or perhaps a deeply intertwined set of
assumptions, of whi deconstruction cannot quite bring itself to let go,
whi does not allow Derrida to turn around and peer through the cras in
the “world egg”9 into a more expansive domain, as do the other twentieth-
century theorists discussed below. Derrida anowledges that
“deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work” because
it operates from within the existing structure, employing the conceptual
instruments aracteristic of the logocentric epo to subvert and destabilize
the structural assumptions that have generally resided below conscious
awareness in an enactment of pure reason devouring itself, loed in a fixed
circulation like a snake eating its own tail, until the snake eats its own
head.10
 It is undoubtedly true that Derrida’s thought developed significantly over
the course of his long, extremely prolific career, and that his tone and
approa had shied somewhat by the late eighties and nineties. Derrida is
almost positive at certain moments in texts like 1987’s “A Number of Yes”
and 1993’s The Gift of Death, despite the laer’s subject maer, writing of
“an incorporation of an earlier mystery that blurs the limits of every epo,”
perhaps creating an opening to aracteristically nonmodern modes of
thought, an insight resonant with Derrida’s recognition in Of Grammatology
that traces of an “ultra-transcendental text” beyond the logocentric
metaphysics remain in the texts of the logocentric epo, so that a novel
expression exceeding logocentrism is not merely a regression to a naïve
mode whi cannot be distinguished from texts wrien prior to the advent
of critical thought, but must retain the whole course of its movement within
its emergent actuality.11 Similarly, in The Gift of Death, Derrida suggests
that “every revolution, whether atheistic or religious, bears witness to a
return of the sacred in the form of enthusiasm or fervor, otherwise known as
the presence of the gods within us,”12 an ambiguous suggestion perhaps
resonant with the evocations of gods by Selling, Nietzse, Jung, Deleuze,
Hillman, and Stengers discussed below. Derrida also deeply and
sympathetically explores the intertwining of spirit and animality in his
concept of “divinanimality” in The Animal That Therefore I Am, a 1997
lecture published in 2008.
However, as evident in this late text, he never manages to move past the
dwelling with embarrassment that marks his earlier readings, telling his
audience that “I have trouble, yes, a bad time overcoming my
embarrassment,” in this case standing naked in front of his cat, an affect he
identifies as a malaise in whi he is “ashamed of being ashamed,” similarly
expressing shame in 1993’s Specters of Marx for not having recently read
The Communist Manifesto.
13 In a 1996 interview, Derrida asserts “I think

about nothing but death,”14 tarrying perpetually within the self-enclosed

vortex of negative affect intimately entwined with the critical rationality of
a negative philosophy devouring itself, a vicious affective-theoretical circle
from whi he cannot seem to escape, as su an escape requires a leap
beyond rationality, a positive trust variously evoked by James, Bergson,
Whitehead, and Stengers.15 As John Protevi writes, “we must not exaggerate
the import of this shi,” as Derrida’s development from the fiies to the
nineties “maintains a continuity of concerns with his earlier work,”16 Peter
Salmon observing that “the coherence of Derrida’s thinking, from his
earliest works through to his last is remarkable,”17 and Derrida himself
definitively stating: “I don’t think I have ever repudiated anything.”18
Deconstruction is a profoundly useful and necessary tool for problematizing
and destabilizing binary sites of existing oppression based on race, sex,
gender, sexual orientation, class, geography, disability, and many other
hierarical privilegings, including epistemology, for whi “the writing of
reason” has been privileged over “the writing of the heart” (resonant with
Deleuze’s capital “organ of exange” and “amorous organ of repetition”19),
and the privileging of “man” over that whi defines this figure by its
exclusion: woman, nature, animality, primitivism, ildhood, madness,
divinity.20 However, I agree with Cisney’s assessment that deconstruction is
primarily a negative differential ontology21 less useful for the creation of
novel positive concepts than the work of the other theorists discussed in
these pages. It remains the fact, then, that Of Grammatology serves as the
primary exemplification of the deconstructive mode of thought, “the
founding text of deconstruction,”22 as Salmon writes, whi Derrida’s later
texts further elaborated, but never supplanted.
e difficulty in interpreting Derrida is similar in some ways to the
difficulty in reading Plato: It is oen uncertain if these philosophers are
speaking for themselves or as others, as Plato’s aracters in the dialogues or
as the texts Derrida amplifies and deconstructs, but does not exactly critique.
In a section of The Gift of Death in whi he is discussing the Biblical story
of Abraham’s interrupted sacrifice of Isaac, Derrida might as well be
describing his own approa, so that deconstruction can be understood as
“the exposure of conceptual thinking to its limit, to its death and finitude,” as
Derrida’s writing can be conceived as a sustained metarhetorical gambit
whose purpose is to “intrigue, disconcert, question.” He primarily “speaks
without saying anything either true or false, says nothing determinate that
would be equivalent to a statement, a promise, or a lie,” and he “uers
nothing fixed, determinable, positive or negative,” so that Derrida’s
expression of this disconcerting questioning perhaps became more subtle
over the decades of his work, but it was never abandoned.23 One does not
come away from Derrida’s texts with a clear sense of what he believes or
asserts, but only with a sense of disorienting dislocation whi nevertheless
impels one to think carefully and to interrogate every assumption, an
activity whi Derrida obliquely associates with Socratic irony, but whi
tends to produce an affect of hollowness and exhaustion very different from
the invigorating plenitude of Plato’s dialogues, or the other theorists
discussed below.24
However, this is not a book against deconstruction, but rather a work that
appreciates the profound novelty of Derrida’s thought, but that also
recognizes its affective sense of being enclosed, even imprisoned, despite its
explicit orientation toward liberation. It is a liberation without an outside
into whi one might escape, an ultimately complex instrument for untying
oppositional bonds and unloing hierarical doors, whi nevertheless is
unable (at least without the help of the allies discussed in the apters
below) to provide a means for crossing the threshold to a vast openness
beneath a star-strewn sky, a more expansive domain beyond the horizon
that deconstruction allows one to see so clearly, but does not engender the
means to pursue; a way of seeing through, but not a means of movement. So
rather than denounce deconstruction, whi is extraordinarily efficacious
and valid as far as it goes, and whose terms and moves are imbricated with
other, complementary verbal modes throughout the present text, I instead
want to assist in deconstruction’s liberation from itself as gratitude for its
having provided essential instruments for its own overcoming.25 I want to
participate in the collective embracing of deconstruction’s epoal concepts
and forms of language, whi we can never unlearn once they have been
established, within a mode of thought that may serve to carry
deconstruction into a continually created paradoxical promised land just
beyond an ever-receding horizon, though its author must remain forever
outside this novel domain.26
In fact, Derrida’s thought is deeply resonant with concepts expressed by
the other theorists to whom this book devotes apters, and he was even
influenced by some of them, but whereas all of the other theorists employ
the negative mode to generate openings for their positive conceptual
creations, Derrida dwells primarily with the negative inflections of these
concepts. While deconstruction is very close to integration, it is the most
complete and profound expression of that mode’s shadow, the negative
space whi partially constitutes its structure, and thus all of the other texts
discussed below enable a Whiteheadian “slightest ange of tone whi yet
makes all the difference”27 from deconstruction into a novel mode of
relation. My intention is not primarily to critique Derrida, though critique
inevitably plays a role when aempting to go beyond a mode of thought,
but to demonstrate how Derrida has cleared the space that was filled by
exclusivist rationality, allowing the expression of novel modes of thought,
though he generally articulates the negative inflections of these conceptual
modes whi are nevertheless profoundly resonant with the positive
concepts created and refined by the other theorists. Deconstruction is a
nearly pure negative philosophy, in Selling’s sense, in that it does not posit
metaphysical concepts or potencies, denying metaphysics altogether,
dwelling almost entirely with absence, negative affect, and the negative
inflections of the vast and multifarious conceptual complexes explored in
their positive inflections by the others. It might even be said that this
apter’s aim is to demonstrate how deconstruction deconstructs itself, to
assist in its self-deconstruction.
From Of Grammatology’s outset, Derrida circulates around the
recognition that the past is only represented to us in semiotic traces. As he
notoriously and ambiguously expresses it, “there is nothing outside of the
text” (or, more accurately, “there is no outside-text”), by whi he seems to
connote that everything we know, our largest field of lived reality, is
constructed from the relations of sign systems, that the fabric of our most
basic experience is ultimately con-textual.28 For Derrida, this constructed
quality of reality has been almost impossible to perceive, has been obscured
by the fact that the very verbal, conceptual, and perceptual relations through
whi we know reality condition the reality we can know. ese semiotic
networks, in fact, constitute our reality, as “we think only in signs,”29 though
our signifying systems are culturally bound, and can take radically different
forms in different times and different places. But for him, this mutability of
language and signs, and thus of the world they largely constitute, indicates
that a profound violence has been done, that an invisibly pervasive tri has
been played on us, and that we should be skeptical of any meanings
assumed as given, a mode whi has been nominated as a “hermeneutics of
suspicion,”30 genealogically related to Nietzse’s “sooling in suspicion,”31
though Derrida even judges “the Nietzsean demolition” as “a captive of
that metaphysical edifice whi it professes to overthrow.”32 Derrida does
not quite seem to see that this judgment applies perhaps even more to his
own demolition than to Nietzse’s, as although Nietzse certainly engages
in a Sellingian negative philosophy of critique and denouncement, this
destruction is oriented toward the creation of important positive concepts
like the Apollonian and Dionysian, the will to power, the eternal return, and
the Overman, while Derrida’s conceptual creations are almost exclusively
tools, however useful and profound, for a negative and disconcerting
problematizing.
Derrida is suspicious of the very concepts of history and time, suggesting
that the values of logocentrism have constituted the predominant mode of
thought in modernity, though this mode has its roots in the pre-Socratic
Greek philosophers and the ancient Hebrews. He recognizes that our
understanding of history and temporality itself is predicated upon the
privileging of the Logos of wrien language and, if we are to see through
this privileging, we are le without an adequate frame for our self-
understanding, a narrative for rendering our relationship to our past
intelligible. If we have not been progressively extricating ourselves from
irrational and naïve superstitions and beliefs in the ascent of science and
intellect, whi are complicit with writing, how can we understand our
current situation? Derrida defines the problem again and again, aaing
the implicit privileging of logocentrism from every conceivable angle until
the metaphysical presuppositions of the last several millennia of primarily
Western culture have been demolished, or at least rendered extremely
unstable. And at the root of this pervasive logocentrism, Derrida finds an
internal spee whi brings forth opposition, suggesting that conceptual
thought is constituted in a speaking to oneself in silent words,33 that
conceptual thought can only occur through words, and that this internal
spee is intimately bound up with opposition, as thought first must
discriminate, must divide the world, as in Plato’s dialectical “method of
division,”34 from its undifferentiated prerationality into verbal duality,
monocentrically circulating within “the system of oppositions of
metaphysics.”35 We differentiate between different kinds of entities through
pervasive binarity, and this oppositional structure of language emerged
coextensively with the interior monologue of conceptual mentality – or
perhaps dialogue, assuming a generally silent other as implicit witness to the
internal monologic uerance – and in order to liberate ourselves from this
oppositional metaphysics, he suggests, we must aain a mode of thought
whi enacts a deconstruction of the oppositional system of verbal
differentiation at the heart of wrien language.
For Derrida, the deconstruction of the logocentric metaphysics dominant
for the last several thousand years is a brave descent into the abyss,
shedding a conception of the world that is generally conflated with reality
itself without the promise of anything to replace it, as “one does not leave
the epo whose closure one can outline.”36 is deconstructive activity is
not primarily a movement toward a future – or if it is future-oriented, it
constructs this future to come as an eternally deferred haunting absence, as
in Specters of Marx – not the positive transition to a novel epo, but rather
a closure without a commensurate opening in sight, as Derrida generally
does not evoke any new mode that might emerge from the closure of this
epo, foreclosing the positing of su a further development in anything
other than the most enigmatic intimations.37 e possible exits from this
enclosure are bloed because any words one might employ to describe su
an emergence are circumscribed by the implicit assumptions that reside in
language itself, so that Derrida is brilliant, profound, and almost uerly
desolate, because the very verbally constructed concepts through whi we
might generate a novel mode of thought keep us confined.38 Derrida’s
conception of liberation through deconstruction is of mind devouring itself,
the inevitably futile aempt to think one’s way beyond thought, to push
rationality to its limits in order to go beyond rationality rather than taking
the leap, as James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Stengers all especially conceive
it, into a radically novel domain beyond the exclusive privileging of the
rational. Derrida maintains that the metaphysics of difference at the root of
writing, with fundamental constraints built into its relational structure,
cannot be employed to go outside that semiotic system, as conceptual
thought is thinkable only by means of language, and anything beyond that
domain is not capable of being thought.39
Although I will argue against this mode, oen implicitly, in the pages and
apters that follow (the kind of argument one might have with an old
friend with whom one has far more in common than not), I would like to
take a moment to give this position its due, to anowledge that all of us, at
one time or another, have felt completely constrained, have dwelled with the
profound bodily sense that there is no way out of our predicament. During
these times, no maer how we look at things, our usually inspired and
incisive rational capacities can see no logical conclusion other than that
everything we have known, including logic itself, has been a lie, a kind of
metaphysical dirty tri, and there is no escaping this complex self-enclosed
situation, whi is both affective and theoretical. Although Derrida briefly
gestures toward a possible overcoming of this state in “the ineluctable world
of the future whi proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of
knowledge,”40 a domain that can only barely be discerned in “the crevice
through whi the yet unnamable glimmer beyond the closure can be
glimpsed,”41 twiting ba the curtain for the briefest of moments, he
denies the possibility of a contemporary knowledge about su a self-
overcoming. Others, however, perhaps especially Deleuze (of those in
Derrida’s milieu), were doing mu more than merely glimpsing this future
in 1967. But Derrida sees no possibility of cating more than this glimpse of
any potential future opening, not only because it is “an absolute danger” and
“a monstrosity”42 (a different kind of relation to monstrosity than the one
Deleuze embraces), indicating a legitimate terror of venturing into
indiscernible domains, of the absence of normative certainty, but also
because there is no exergue, the moo on the ba of a coin, for a future
emergence, no precedent for what is to come.
I will spend the rest of this book pushing against Derrida’s claim, offering
an exergual plenitude for an emerging dispensation, as Derrida’s terror of
the dangerous and the monstrous forms a significant element of the affective
tone constituting the pre-philosophical baground of the deconstructive
mode of thought. I will suggest that the theorists referred to in the apters
that follow who preceded Derrida were oen articulating a mode
developmentally subsequent to the one Derrida so completely and brilliantly
exemplifies, an insight especially derived from Whitehead, as it might be
suggested that the conceptual constructions expressed by Derrida, or any of
these other theorists, are not fundamentally new. ese two modes, the
deconstructive and the integrative, can be conceived as having been
enacting a relational drama circulating through polarity since at least the
controversy between Plato and the Sophists. Derrida and the movement of
thought he exemplifies have perhaps coincided with the apex of the sophistic
end of the polarity in the contemporary cultural sphere (though this is not
merely an insult as it has oen been intended), the deconstructive mode
having oen dominated the central nodes of discursive power of the
Anglophone humanities in the last few decades of the twentieth century,
and perhaps even the first decade of the twenty-first, serving as the
decentering theoretical center of the more expansive critique and disavowal
of modernity in many domains. e other twentieth-century theorists
discussed in the apters below are primary representatives of a
complementary mode of thought that has begun to surge into collective
awareness over the last few decades, a mode for whi deconstruction has
cleared a space and prepared the way.43
e majority of Of Grammatology is involved in a sympathetic
deconstructive reading of several texts by Rousseau, with the anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss, who felt himself to be Rousseau’s heir, serving as an
entrée to this reading, his texts providing “somewhat more than an
exergue”44 for the central concerns of Derrida’s text, whi, like the work of
Ferdinand de Saussure, inhabit a liminal border between the logocentric
metaphysics and their deconstruction, though we may further discern that
Derrida’s work is similarly situated on another liminal border, whi can be
recognized as deconstruction itself, between two epos. It is striking that
this work of solarship on primarily a single figure from the eighteenth
century should be accorded a status as magnum opus similar to other great
works in the history of philosophy by figures like Kant, Hegel, and
Heidegger. is text seems to have been elevated over others because its
deconstructive mode of reading is so novel, and its style so startling and
subtle, but also because it exemplifies the primary spirit of what would come
to be called “poststructuralism,” a peak expression of Sellingian negative
philosophy, whi does not posit anything, but brilliantly expresses the
problems and questions of the epo coming to a close by performing the
deconstruction of Rousseau’s texts.
Rousseau plays a unique role in the progression from Plato to Hegel,
enacting perhaps the most decisive and revealing defensive reaction in the
eighteenth century against aas on the logocentric metaphysics,
mediating the enigmatic and paradoxical threshold between the
Enlightenment and Romanticism.45 A reading of Derrida resembling, in
another register, the close reading Derrida gives to Rousseau may discern
that deconstruction enacts the peak expression of a negative philosophy
while paradoxically presiding over the threshold to a novel positive mode.
Derrida’s orientation is almost exclusively toward interrogating and
destabilizing the logocentric epo, but the constructive threads of Derrida’s
text, relatively rare and ambiguous in comparison to its primary
deconstructive project, can be brought into resonance with the other
theorists to show how their concepts, many of whi are already complexly
interwoven, can be further integrated, while maintaining their contrasting
differentiation, to create novel conceptual domains beyond deconstruction
that we can collectively inhabit.
 For Derrida, these proper names – Plato, Rousseau, Hegel – nominate
problems or symptoms more than the “the authors of movements”46
embodying “the original myth of a transparent legibility,”47 a negative
inflection of the mythical as a naïve self-identity to whose violent
obliteration Derrida bears eloquent witness. For Deleuze and Guaari,
however, the names of philosophers are conceptual personae in the long,
complex, and periodically revised philosophical narrative internally resonant
with mythical potencies precisely because they are constituted in a
problematic and pathological multiplicity beyond the mere identity of egoic
monocentrism, carried along a series of nonlocal and nonlinear differential
repetitions, through the affirmation and selection of the eternal return, to the
higher expressions of the faculties, a conceptual complex partially derived
from Spinoza, Leibniz, Selling, and Nietzse.
Derrida is not precisely critical of Rousseau. Rather, he tarries with
Rousseau’s negative relation to writing and essential presence, dwelling
sustainedly with him as an exemplar of the logocentric epo over whose
closure Derrida presides so that “a text always has several epos,”48 the
epos to whi it responds, the epo of its writing, and the epos of its
later reception, all complexly imbricated in the text and the various
appropriations, extensions, critiques, and rejections it has afforded in its
readers (or its non-readers, as is oen the case with Derrida himself49).
rough his close reading, Derrida allows the aporias and inconsistencies,
the lacunae and margins of the rhizomatic “root system”50 of logocentric
metaphysics subtending Rousseau’s texts to reveal themselves, uncovering a
genealogy that greatly exceeds the explicit textual system whi represents
its presence within the limits of a single epo. He does not denounce
Rousseau or offer an alternative as do the other theorists, but circulates
within the self-enclosed auto-affection of rationalist consciousness in the
wake of Descartes, a biunivocal self-presence divided into solitary mind and
one true God that circumscribes the logocentric epo.
As Derrida recognizes in relation to the nonrational whi Rousseau
violently excluded precisely because this domain “fascinated and tormented
him more than it did others,”51 it is oen those domains whi most trouble
us, whi are most affectively problematic for us, that lure us toward our
greatest aievements, an insight discussed below especially in relation to
Nietzse’s concept of ressentiment and Deleuze’s conception, with Guaari,
of the anti-Oedipal. is formulation is reminiscent of Derrida’s observation
during a 1990 interview at his home in Paris, whi has just been
interrupted by a phone call from Emmanuel Lévinas, that his friend “always
thinks I am going to hang up before the conversation is over, and constantly
interrupts with anxious exclamations,” whi Derrida recognizes as a deeply
ironic anxiety for the philosopher “who talks about faith in the other,” an
endearing moment whi reveals that, like Nietzse’s personal and
conceptual struggle with ressentiment, Lévinas’ undeniably brilliant work
was nevertheless at least partially motivated by a fear of abandonment,
perhaps related to his experience in a Nazi prison camp.52 And without
being “biographically reductive,” as Salmon cautions, one might posit a
similar recognition in whi Derrida’s dwelling primarily with the negative
in order heroically to liberate his epo from a negative logocentrism is
partially motivated by his sustained and problematic experience with the
negative affects to whi he so oen returns – terror, shame, mourning.
ese affects are partially traceable to the death of his older brother only ten
months before Derrida’s birth, whi “haunted Jaie throughout his life,”
and to the political upheavals that occurred during his ildhood “in the
margins” in Algeria, where his family’s place as Jews in a majority Muslim
country under Fren colonial rule was complex and problematic, a liminal
“quasi-subgroup” between Fren and Arab suffering from a “disorder of
identity.”53 In fact, Derrida explicitly recognizes the significance of his
biography for understanding the origins of his philosophy, writing: “A
Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian genealogy does not clarify everything, far from it.
But could I explain anything without it, ever? No, nothing.”54
Although he subtly distances his authorial voice from Rousseau’s
negativity toward those domains that exceed rationality, Derrida’s text
amplifies the affectively negative currents of Rousseau’s thought, inhabiting
a moment of closure whi mourns the terrifying loss of that negativity as at
least a kind of solid grounding, a dwelling with the loss of grounding in an
affective and conceptual “negativity so negative that it could not even be
called su any longer.”55 Derrida invokes a negativity that exceeds mere
critical negation as well as positive affirmation, not erasing, but defining a
negative space, as in visual art, whi serves as a blank, groundless
baground for concepts that complementary theorists, culminating with
Deleuze, Hillman, and Stengers, will express in their positive valences,
though always entwined with negative differentiation, by carrying the
concepts from the earlier theorists discussed in these pages into ever more
subtly differentiated and integrated formulations. No one is more subtle
than Derrida, but perhaps it is easier to be subtle when one’s field of vision
is limited almost entirely to discerning shades and gradations within the
shadows of an enclosed space, while the others are peering into the heavens,
some, perhaps culminating with Hegel, toward the unifying centrality of the
Sun, and some toward the multiplicity of centers figured by the labyrinthine
nighime sky.
rough the medium of writing, Derrida tarries sustainedly with
Rousseau’s ironic exposure and denouncement of the evil and enslavement
of writing, also expressed in writing, so that this text doubly imprisons the
reader in a cage of writing whi Derrida dismantles, but for whi there is
nothing outside, perhaps only a faint glimmer. For Derrida “the outside is
the inside,”56 a phrase wrien with the “is” crossed out, ambiguously
evoking an affectively and theoretically enclosed space whi cannot be
escaped even by going outside, as this escape leads inexorably ba into the
labyrinth, an insight whi only requires the affective inversion
aracteristic of a joyful and creative liberation to take on its constructive
valence, to whi Derrida gestures for the briefest of moments as “radically
empiricist,” evoking James, entwined with an experimental “errancy”57
especially resonant with Deleuze and Hillman. For the constructivist
theorists, however, the constructed quality of language, and the semiotic
relation to experience in general, is not imprisoning or enslaving, but a
liberation from the givenness of the traditional metaphysics into a radically
“free and wild creation of concepts,” a phrase from Deleuze and Guaari
that Stengers employs as the subtitle to Thinking With Whitehead. Although
Deleuze overturns the Platonic escape from the cave to resituate this exit as
an infinite labyrinth of caves that we reciprocally construct as we explore,
these caverns, far from inducing claustrophobia as they seem to do for
Derrida, can also be conceived as the vast cosmos opened through our
liberated creation.58 is paradoxical inversion is thus an affective-
theoretical shi that enables an overturning and reappropriation of
deconstruction, allowing the positive construction of novel worlds through a
radical, metaphysical, speculative, transcendental empiricism expressed
through writing.
Derrida’s conception of “différance” as an ungrounded but originary
domain of infinite reflections, the paradoxically nonoriginary “trace” whi
figures the differential “origin of the origin,”59 and the terrifying, dangerous,
and maddening “supplement” between presence and absence, whose
“strange essence” is “not to have essentiality,”60 is, like Deleuze’s
ungrounding ground of difference, a recognition that our experience of the
world is constructed from an ultimate relationality, whi does not rest on a
fixed, transcendent grounding, the thing itself whi Derrida nominates the
“transcendental signified,”61 whether of Platonic Forms, monotheistic
divinity, physical materiality, or the Hegelian absolute. However, whereas
Derrida almost exclusively dwells with this ungrounding “middle term”62 as
a dire and frustrating loss of certainty to be lamented, Deleuze expresses this
ungrounding relationality in “the middle” where “one begins again”63 as a
deeper kind of paradoxical grounding whi, like Derrida’s conception,
liberates from the old metaphysical conceptions of a monocentric
“ontotheology”64 (a Kantian and Heideggerian term combining the ontology
of God and the theology of Being), but whi serves for Deleuze as an
immensely expanded domain for the joyful creation of novel concepts.
Like Deleuze, Derrida discerns Hegel as the peak expression of a
logocentric metaphysics, though he also evinces an appreciation for Hegel as
“the thinker of irreducible difference,”65 an appreciation not as present in
Deleuze, but whi will inform the reading of Difference and Repetition
below. Derrida evokes Hegel as delimiting “the horizon of absolute
knowledge”66 beyond whi Derrida cannot see, an unthinkable domain
“outside of the horizon”67 circumscribed by writing, only accessible to the
“limitlessness of play,” whi sounds joyful and creative of positive
conceptions until Derrida immediately equates this play with the decidedly
negative “destruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence.”68 In
contrast, Deleuze, despite his valorization of creative destruction,69 evokes a
“transcendental horizon”70 infinitely pursued by means of conceptual
creation from all kinds of topologically figured differences beyond the
dominance of dialectical opposition. e horizon can only be constructed as
a fixed, constraining boundary, “the widest horizon of the questions”71 of the
closure of logocentric metaphysics, if one does not trace a line of flight
casting the dice beyond this fenced grounding where play occurs, this
Heraclitan-Aeonic playground for “the game of the world,” 72 and the
horizon only expands or recedes with our creative movements through
spatiotemporal dimensions. For Derrida, it is the image of play in
Saussurean linguistics, a “reassuring closing of play”73 imagined as the game
of ess and its virtually infinite variations within the perfectly delimited
space of the board mirroring its fixed rules and relations in a “total
system,”74 that must be overcome through deconstruction, though it is
Deleuze who especially expresses play as a “divine game”75 of affirmative
creation beyond the enclosure with whi Derrida lingers.76
Leibnizian mathesis universalis is a mode of apprehension both
mathematical and metaphysical, whi Derrida judges as still constrained
within logocentrism, whereas, although Deleuze offers some similar
criticisms of Leibniz, he does this in order to differentiate the Leibnizian
infinitesimal form of the integral and differential calculus to serve as a
primary element in his conception of a deeper kind of dialectic beyond
opposition. Stengers takes up this conception in her discussions of Leibniz’s
concept of Calculemus as a primary method for forging a peace, however
risky and provisional, from discordant modes of relation with their various
constraints and obligations, rather than merely asserting reasoning in the
mode of reductive calculation as Derrida seems to suggest. Stengers
implicitly recognizes Derrida as ironically reducing Leibniz’s concepts,
defining them too narrowly in order to shoehorn them into a purely
logocentric metaphysics, while for Deleuze and Stengers, Leibniz cannot be
so easily categorized as a mere logocentric rationalist.
Derrida is especially dismissive of final causation, asserting that it has
generally constituted a naïve and illusory Western “ethnocentric
metaphysics,”77 a rejection that has been fairly pervasive in both modern
and “postmodern” thought. However, the “onto-theo-teleology”78 Derrida
rejects, like the finalism rejected by Spinoza, is ironically the most naïve
conception of teleology constructed as moving toward a fixed, given end, an
oversimplification (one of only a very few to whi both Derrida and
Spinoza succumb) that most of the theorists below will complicate and
deepen as an inclinational finalism receding toward the dissolution of the
binary of finalism and its rejection, a decentered conception of teleology
beyond the exclusively privileged Logos as central telos more evocative of
the strange aractor of fractal geometry. Derrida recognizes that the
deconstructive moment constitutes “a crisis of the logos,” though he
deconstructs the “concept of crisis” itself, rendering it “suspect” as enacting
“a dialectical and teleological” mode of thought, problematizing the concept
of epoal catastrophic rupture through his reading of Rousseau,79 whereas
most of the others will recognize crisis as the precondition for
transformative renascence in more profound dialectical and teleological
conceptions. In a text wrien in the 1950s but only published in 2002,
Deleuze writes that “it is not that there is a second birth because there has
been a catastrophe, but the reverse, there is a catastrophe aer the origin
because there must be, from the beginning, a second birth,”80 expressing a
more subtle valence of teleological death-and-rebirth than the one Derrida
ambiguously refuses, ultimately resonant with amor fati, the love of fate
traceable ba through Nietzse to Spinoza and the Stoics, as mu as with
the subtle conceptions of final causation expressed by most of the other
theorists below. In fact, Derrida recognizes that it is “essentially
impossible”81 to avoid teleological modes of discourse, and although his
valiant aempt to enact this avoidance has produced a liberating
differentiation, it may be recognized that this liberation can never exceed
teleology as su, but can only overcome the naïve form of teleology
grounded in a transcendent domain, liberated into a more subtle expression
of inclinational teleology grounded in ungrounding differential relationality.
Similarly, Derrida obliquely expresses différance as that whi exceeds
formal causation and its rejection, as “the formation of form,”82 an insight
resonant with Deleuze’s infinite regress whi recedes beyond the
opposition of formality and formlessness, Derrida, like Deleuze, evoking
Bergson’s concept of the virtual as a way potentially to dissolve this
opposition. However, whereas Derrida almost exclusively esews the
essentialism of the Platonic Forms, problematizing an “infinitist
metaphysics,”83 whi he also associates with the monocentrism of Christian
theology and the Hegelian absolute, only gesturing toward a “plurivocity,”84
Deleuze copiously expresses a heterogenous pluralism of infinite
multiplicity, appropriating the eidos in his Platonic overturning of Platonism
to express them in a more profound and subtle valence as virtual Ideas,
simulacra, phantasms, multiplicities, problems, questions, and gods, a
reframing of formal causes resonant with most of the other theorists below.
Whereas Derrida inherits the denouncement of metaphysics from Heidegger,
so that the differential trace cannot be described by any metaphysics,85
Deleuze affirms metaphysics so completely that his conception exceeds even
a Sellingian metaphysical empiricism in the form of a transcendental
empiricism, or even pataphysics, a novel mode of thought whi, as Deleuze
quotes Alfred Jarry in 1964, is a conception “extending as far beyond
metaphysics as metaphysics extends beyond physics,”86 though in 1980,
Deleuze states that “I see myself as a pure metaphysician.”87 Like Deleuze
and Hillman, Derrida recognizes that the trace beyond formality and
formlessness “exceeds the question What is? and contingently makes it
possible,”88 though he does not risk the leap explicitly undertaken by both
Deleuze and Hillman (and implicitly by Selling, Nietzse, Jung, and
Stengers) of asking “Who?”, addressing their questions about the deepest
becomings of process to transcendental persons variously imagined as
ontologically ambiguous potencies, aretypes, ancestors, or gods.
Expressing a conception whose negative valence is a resonant inversion of
the more positive valences of Spinoza, Nietzse, Bergson, Whitehead, Jung,
and Deleuze, Derrida recognizes that differential relationality does not occur
in time, but rather that linear temporality itself (whether straight or cyclical
in a monocentric circulation) is violently extracted by means of language,
and especially phonetic writing, from a deeper domain of difference. Derrida
generally does not positively describe the suppressed temporal constructions
exceeding the successive and homogenous linearity of historical temporality,
a Heideggerian “vulgar concept of time”89 that emerged in “an extraordinary
leap”90 coextensive with linear writing about four thousand years ago, whi
finds its peak expression in the reductive absolute time of Newtonian
physics (despite Newton’s interest in alemy), and whi has been the
almost exclusively dominant philosophical conception of time from Aristotle
to Hegel. is temporal conception has provided a sense of secure order in “a
dangerous and anguishing world” through its enabling of tenology,
economy, ideology, and hierary, but it has suppressed other legitimate
modes of temporal construction with their concomitant faculties. Derrida
only briefly gestures toward the concept of the symbolically situated
mythogram derived from André Leroi-Gourhan, whi Derrida describes as
“a writing that spells its symbols pluri-dimensionally,” and whi
“corresponds to another level of historical experience,”91 and the theorists
below will have mu more to say about heterodox modes of temporal
construction intertwined with nonlinear linguistic forms, symbolic
mythography, and plural dimensionalities, from the Nietzsean-Deleuzean
eternal return to Bergsonian duration, the Whiteheadian epoal theory of
time, and Jungian synronicity.
For Derrida, “the end of linear writing,” and the accompanying closure of
the dominance of an exclusively linear temporal construction, is not
primarily to be enacted by “confiding new writings to the envelope of the
book,” but rather by “finally reading what wrote itself between the lines in
the volumes”92 that have formed the central canon of the logocentric
metaphysics, so that while his deconstructions of the texts of Lévi-Strauss or
Rousseau certainly problematize the linear constructions of writing and
temporality, these close readings exhibit a parasitical aracter, whi
Derrida recognized.93 However, this deconstruction, whi Derrida
understands as a culmination of the destruction of linearity that has been
occurring since the mid-nineteenth century, constituting a caesura partially
initiated by Selling and Nietzse from whi we are perhaps only now
beginning to emerge, has cleared space for the decidedly novel compositions
of the post-Hegelian theorists below, who nevertheless remain deeply
involved with earlier theorists, whose writing was no less novel in their
moments. Derrida and Deleuze can be conceived as together enacting the
apex of a “suspense between two ages of writing,” though Derrida is
primarily concerned with the closure of the first age, while Deleuze offers a
multiplicity of openings to the second. Like most of the other theorists,
however, Derrida understands that the emergence of a nonlinear and
pluridimensional mode of thought aer the closure of logocentrism is not
merely constituted in a regression to nonmodern mythography, but is rather
a recognition that linear rationality itself is one kind of mythography among
others, enacting the emergence from the exclusive privileging of a rational
mythography into a “meta-rationality”94 whi anowledges the partial
validity of all modes of mythographical construction, integrating them into
a more deeply differentiated mode of relation. is recognition is resonant
not only with broadly constructivist theorists like Nietzse, James, Bergson,
Whitehead, Deleuze, and Stengers, but also, perhaps surprisingly, with
aretypal thinkers like Jung and Hillman. In fact, the apters below
partially excavate an unexpected, almost secret, Jungian lineage at the heart
of the major stream of Fren philosophy running from Baelard and
Simondon through Deleuze and Guaari.
In a conception especially congruent with Hillman, Derrida recognizes
that metaphorical and figurative language are more profound than a literal
nominalism reductively extracted from a deeper domain of differential
relations. Derrida expresses logocentrism as a “heliocentric concept,”95
referring not only to the Copernican revolution whi, perhaps more than
any other discovery, served as a symbolic enactment of the ascendance of
egoic reason in modernity, but also to the Platonic association of the Logos
with the sun, the good, the intelligible, the king, and the father. is is an
assemblage of correlations whi evokes the mythologically derived
Apollonian potency described by Nietzse in concert with the figure of
Kronos as explicated by Selling, Jung, Hillman, and Deleuze and Guaari,
serving to decenter this totalitarian expression of the solar potency in a
novel polycentric mythical dialectic especially articulated by Deleuze, to
whi Derrida only briefly gestures as a mode beyond the dominance of
rationalist philosophy and science, a logocentric dominance whi organizes
domains as varied as politics and the family, economics and diplomacy,
agriculture and penal law. is mythically integrated dialectic is not a mere
regression to a prescientific discursive mode prior to the emergence of
philosophy with the pre-Socratics and Plato, but a novel approa,
aracteristic of both constructivist continental theory and depth
psyology, whi integrates the philosophical and scientific with the
literary, poetic, and mythographic, a new mode of writing composing “a
future epo of différance”96 variously expressed by all of the twentieth-
century theorists below in its fully differentiated and nuanced complexity
beyond the closure over whi Derrida primarily presides.
Notes
1. Derrida, Grammatology, lxxxix.
2. Derrida, Grammatology, 43, 46–7.
3. Derrida, Grammatology, lxxxix, 70, 246.
4. Derrida, Grammatology, 83, 158.
5. Deleuze, Desert, 190.
6. Derrida, Grammatology, 7.
7. Derrida, Grammatology, 14, 23–4.
8. Derrida, Grammatology, 24, 88.
9. Deleuze, Difference, 216, 251.
10. Derrida, Grammatology, lxxxix, 24.
11. Derrida, Grammatology, 61.
12. Derrida, Gift, 23.
13. Derrida, Specters, 2.
14. Derrida and Ferraris, Taste, 88.
15. Derrida, Animal, 4, 132.
16. Paon and Protevi, Between, 184.
17. Salmon, Event, 6.
18. Derrida, Ear, 142.
19. Deleuze, Difference, 2.
20. Derrida, Grammatology, 174.
21. Cisney, Deleuze, 13.
22. Salmon, Event, 127.
23. See Derrida, Writing, 193–4.
24. Derrida, Gift, 77; Derrida, Grammatology, 212, 215; Stengers, Another,
145.
25. Nietzse, Gay, 99.
26. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 322.
27. Whitehead, Science, 2; Cf. Derrida, Grammatology, 257.
28. Derrida, Grammatology, 158.
29. Derrida, Grammatology, 50.
30. See Ricoeur, Freud.
31. Nietzse, Human, 5.
32. Derrida, Grammatology, 19.
33. See Hippolyte, Logic, 8.
34. Plato, Works, 294.
35. Derrida, Grammatology, 9.
36. Derrida, Grammatology, 12.
37. Derrida, Grammatology, 4.
38. Derrida, Grammatology, 24.
39. Derrida, Grammatology, 60.
40. Derrida, Grammatology, 4.
41. Derrida, Grammatology, 14.
42. Derrida, Grammatology, 5.
43. Paon and Protevi, Between, 9.
44. Derrida, Grammatology, 100.
45. See Marshall, “Rousseau.”
46. Derrida, Grammatology, 99.
47. Derrida, Grammatology, 109.
48. Derrida, Grammatology, 102.
49. Salmon, Event, 184.
50. Derrida, Grammatology, 102.
51. Derrida, Grammatology, 98.
52. Derrida, “Interview.”
53. Salmon, Event, 19, 22, 24, 165.
54. Derrida, Monolingualism, 71–2.
55. Derrida, Writing, 390n4.
56. Derrida, Grammatology, 44.
57. Derrida, Grammatology, 162.
58. Deleuze, Foucault, 89; Deleuze, Bacon, 134.
59. Derrida, Grammatology, 61.
60. Derrida, Grammatology, 314.
61. Derrida, Grammatology, 20.
62. Derrida, Grammatology, 157.
63. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, viii, 39.
64. Derrida, Grammatology, 10.
65. Derrida, Grammatology, 26.
66. Derrida, Grammatology, 26.
67. Derrida, Grammatology, 44.
68. Derrida, Grammatology, 50.
69. Deleuze, Desert, 136, 139.
70. Deleuze, Difference, 195.
71. Derrida, Grammatology, 102.
72. Derrida, Grammatology, 50.
73. Derrida, Grammatology, 57.
74. Derrida, Grammatology, 45.
75. Deleuze, Difference, 116.
76. Deleuze, Desert, 36.
77. Derrida, Grammatology, 79.
78. Derrida, Grammatology, 73.
79. Derrida, Grammatology, 40.
80. Deleuze, Desert, 13.
81. Derrida, Grammatology, 85.
82. Derrida, Grammatology, 63.
83. Derrida, Grammatology, 71.
84. Derrida, Grammatology, 74.
85. Derrida, Grammatology, 65.
86. Deleuze, Desert, 75; Deleuze, Negotiations, 137.
87. Deleuze, Letters, 78.
88. Derrida, Grammatology, 75.
89. Derrida, Grammatology, 72.
90. Derrida, Grammatology, 131.
91. Derrida, Grammatology, 85.
92. Derrida, Grammatology, 86.
93. Salmon, Event, 186–7.
94. Derrida, Grammatology, 87.
95. Derrida, Grammatology, 91.
96. Derrida, Grammatology, 93.
Chapter 2
Freedom of Mind
Baru Spinoza’s Ethics

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-3

Bergson quipped that “every philosopher has two philosophies: his own and
Spinoza’s,”1 implying that although the Dut philosopher’s thought is
deceptively simple to a surface reading, his work “is not what it seems at
first glance,”2 as Deleuze writes, containing a mysterious depth, especially
his concepts of freedom of mind and of immanence, whi Deleuze calls
“the vertigo of philosophy,”3 a paradoxical disorientation that eludes
conceptual purase, and whi impelled not only Bergson and Deleuze, but
Leibniz, Hegel, Nietzse, Selling, James, Whitehead, and Stengers to
engage with his concepts, even when they disagreed with them. Leibniz
wrote of Spinoza’s metaphysics that it is “strange and full of paradoxes,”
though he deeply respected Spinoza, with whom he spent several days in
1676, the year before Spinoza’s death and the publication of the Ethics.4 And
although Hegel was profoundly influenced by Spinoza, proclaiming that
“you are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all,”5 he was dissatisfied
with the concept of univocity whi las the negative, judging that
Leibniz’s work “outwardly integrates Spinoza’s system”6 through the
differentiation of monadic individuality, an integration paving the way
toward the Hegelian dialectic as well as its overcoming in the integration of
the central concepts of both Spinoza and Leibniz, especially in Deleuze. is
overcoming of Hegel, whi required Hegel’s dialectic as an opening to a
novel mode of thought, was largely initiated by Nietzse who, upon first
reading Spinoza in 1881, wrote to a friend: “I am really amazed, really
delighted! I have a precursor!”7 – although he anowledges their significant
differences.
James writes that there is a “healthy-mindedness woven into the heart
of”8 Spinoza’s thought, whi partially accounts for its enigmatic allure, and
Whitehead offers that although the direct philosophical successors to
Descartes are Loe, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, “two great names lie outside
this list, Spinoza and Leibniz,” as although they were two immediate
successors to Descartes, they both “strayed to extremes whi lie outside the
boundaries of safe philosophy,” creating concepts that have allowed
subsequent philosophers to think beyond the conventional rationalism of
modern thought. Even as brilliant and enigmatic a figure as Derrida does not
know what to make of the assertion of pure immanence by Deleuze, adopted
from Spinoza, writing of an imagined conversation with his contemporary,
who had just passed, that his primary question for Deleuze would concern
“the word ‘immanence’ on whi he always insisted, in order to make him
or let him say something that no doubt still remains secret to us.”9 Deleuze
and Guaari explicitly equate Spinozan immanence with Artaud’s
notoriously elusive concept of the body without organs,10 and also with the
Tao whose ultimate reality eludes verbal expression, and thus we may
temporarily take comfort in the recognition that even Derrida did not quite
understand what Spinoza and Deleuze meant in their assertion of this
concept, though it may become clearer over the course of this narrative.
Spinoza, followed by Deleuze, overturns the oppositional privileging of
transcendent over immanent aracteristic of both the philosophical
tradition derived from Plato and of Christianity in order to assert that “God
is the immanent,” as opposed to the transcendent, “cause of all things,”
though the monotheistic divinity is deemphasized by Deleuze’s expression
of immanence.11 is is perhaps a necessary but transitional reversal for, as
with most concepts expressed through language, immanence is unintelligible
without its opposite in relation to whi it must be defined, a concept of the
transcendent to whi it can be immanent. However, the essential
innovation somewhat obscurely proffered by Spinoza, and brought to its
most subtle and complex formulation by Deleuze, whi Deleuze nominates
a “transcendental empiricism,” is that the transcendent has been a necessary
concept whi is nevertheless unknowable and unthinkable, a placeholder
for that whi subsists at an “always receding cosmological horizon.”12 An
experience of what seems to be a transcendent domain always occurs within
immanence, as any experience that can be had is had immanently, a fold in
a univocal manifold operative in dimensions beyond the four familiar axes
of spacetime so that, like a Möbius strip,13 the inside is always continuous
with the outside, thereby dissolving the duality,14 and thus, as Deleuze
writes in his first book, “the question is no longer about transcendence but
rather about integration.”15 As soon as an experience or a concept passes
from an indiscernible zone into discernibility, it is already immanent, with
the putatively transcendent located just past an eternally pursued horizon of
knowability.16
Like all of the verbal concepts discussed in these pages, it is necessary to
tease apart the positive affirmation of the immanent as the world’s univocity
from the negative denial of the transcendent, a denial whi has been
contextually necessary for the differentiation of immanence from the
hegemony of transcendence, but whi perhaps can now be seen, despite
Deleuze’s implicit objections discussed at length and rendered explicit
below, as the dialectical negative that allowed this further step to be taken.
e negation of the transcendent forms the negative space within the
differentiated structure that can carry us beyond the fixed duality of
immanent and transcendent, integrating them in what can be described as a
transcendental immanence. In fact, this is what Deleuze generally contends,
explicitly stating that “immanence is constructivism,”17 and the duality of
immanent and transcendent itself is constructed from a more profound
univocity, though this aspect of his work is oen misunderstood, in part
because he was in the process of formulating this novel conceptual mode
and thus, like all true pioneers, was sometimes inconsistent, and oen
obscure.18
 e concept of pure immanence may be considered a kind of sleight-of-
hand, an erasure of the transcendent whi leaves a smudged blank space, as
the concept of immanence, by its very definition, is only thinkable in
relation to a concept of transcendence, though the aempt to think pure
immanence has not merely been an error that could have been avoided, but
is rather a dialectical tarrying with the negative deeply resonant with the
unmistakably dialectical aempt to reject the Hegelian dialectic itself, hence
its vertiginous quality. e word immanence requires opposition to a
transcendent conceptuality for its very definition, so asserting pure
immanence can only be a transitional reversal that always implicitly refers
to a hidden, crossed-out transcendent,19 a problematic dualism whi the
lineage running through Spinoza and Deleuze dissolves with the assistance
of the Kantian concept of the transcendental.20 Whereas the transcendent
posits a higher, static, eternal domain beyond a horizon of conception, as in
the Platonic world of Forms or the Christian Heaven, the transcendental
concept constitutes the recognition that any conception of the transcendent
is always already immanent because that conception is occurring in mind
and language whi are immanent in the world – there can be no other
“world” than the open totality described by this word – and thus the domain
beyond a horizon of conception can only be envisaged as a virtual
potentiality not yet expressed in actuality, though its actualization is the
means by whi the horizon recedes.
e problem of immanence derived from Spinoza is intimately related to
the metaphysical correlate of the Leibnizian calculus based on the concept of
the infinitesimal, as the transcendental is the always-receding horizon of
conception, whi our novel modes of thought and language continue to
push ba or pursue, two spatial descriptions for a phenomenon that exceeds
either activity, but whi we can never cross. is horizon itself is our
consciousness and its constructive elicitation of the world, so although
consciousness can transcend its current horizon, and thus can potentially be
expanded and involuted into infinite folds of infinite dimension,
consciousness can never cross the always-receding horizon to a given
transcendent domain, as transcendence is an activity, not a location. e
problem of immanence may find its culmination in the integration of
Leibnizian metaphysical integration with the conception of virtual dynamic
potencies expressed especially by Selling, Nietzse, Jung, and Hillman, an
integration most closely approaed by Deleuze in a mythical dialectic,
although this mode of thought has required the intervening centuries and
their increasingly complex controversies to begin to come to fruition, for as
Spinoza concludes the Ethics: “All things excellent are as difficult as they are
rare.”21
Spinoza circulates around oppositions, not only of transcendent and
immanent, but of joyful and sad affects, of efficient and final causation, and
of determinism and freedom, spiraling in upon a mode of thought whi
overcomes these differentiating binaries in an always-already integrated
univocity of being, so that “this union of bodies,”22 both organismic and
otherwise, is conceived as composing an infinite multiplicity of variations
enacted through complexly intertwining trajectories and speeds.23 For
Spinoza, contra Cartesian dualism, the human mind and body are two
envisagements of the same unified individuality, for whi the mind is the
intensive aspect and the body is the extensive aspect, and the mind is itself
the “idea of the mind,”24 the recursive, involuted awareness of itself as an
embodied mentality, so that it might be said that consciousness is always
already self-consciousness. And it follows from this intertwined unity of
mind and body that the more versatile and capable the body is in its
affective motivity, the more the mind can perceive and conceive. Spinoza
suggests that all of the ideas whi occur in the mind-body complex are
ultimately true “insofar as they are related to God,”25 because like the unity
of mind and body, God is the world itself rather than a being transcendent
to the world – Spinoza’s most controversial doctrine of pantheism, for whi
he was unjustly accused of atheism, and whi is the primary reason he did
not publish the Ethics during his lifetime.
For those of us in the twenty-first century who are accustomed to su a
generally secular conception, whi Spinoza played a large role in creating,
the most striking and enigmatic result of this unity of God and world is that
every idea is ultimately an affirmation, and that falsity is the affirmation of
an idea whi contradicts another idea that was previously affirmed. In this
conception, falsity and error are not things whi positively exist, but are
rather the result of the inadequate expression of ideas through language.
Controversies between apparently opposed or incommensurable modes of
thought are generally the result of misunderstanding and confusion, of one
or both of the parties to the disagreement not aending closely enough to
the subtle nuances of the words employed in articulating the concepts, to the
conceptual complexes whi the words can only asymptotically approa. It
may even be the case that language does not yet exist whi is complexly
differentiated enough to discern the interstices where the binary conflict
dissolves, leading ultimately to a deeper coherence constituted from the
contrasting elements, a conceptual language whi it is the collective project
of all of the theorists discussed in these pages to create. For Spinoza, this
movement toward greater understanding is not merely an abstract
philosophical exercise, but the way in whi a society composed of
individuals can mitigate discord, whi Spinoza associates with evil, and
harmoniously coexist, whi is his definition of the good. Even in cases for
whi opposition and incommensurability appear insurmountable, they
remain contrasting entities in the totality of relations, sometimes as dualities
reconciled in a transformative third element, as in the Hegelian dialectic, but
more oen opening out into a pluralistic multiplicity of relations in more
expansive topological manifolds.26
Spinoza delineates this process of coming to greater understanding as
progressing through three kinds of knowledge: the first is imagination and
opinion, the second is the common notions and adequate ideas of reason,
and the third is intuition, whi discerns the formal essences of the things
that constitute the world. Imagination is the affective precondition for
knowledge, though it is not yet differentiated into the dualistic light of truth
and the accompanying shadow of falsity aracteristic of reason, whi itself
is the precondition for an intuitive knowledge higher than imagination and
reason, whi most of the theorists below will conceive as subsuming the
first two modes of relation in its emergent efficacy. One of Spinoza’s greatest
contributions is to have integrated mind and body, thoughts and affects,
reason and imagination, as different aributes of a single, univocal
substance accessible to intuition, whi Descartes had sundered as his
opening, differentiating gambit.27
But Spinoza’s theory of the affects remains primarily dualistic even in its
assertion of univocity, though there are many complex permutations of this
dualism, either an affirmative joy whi composes variously expressed as
love, wonder, hope, and confidence, or a negative sadness whi decomposes
expressed as hate, anger, fear, and envy – a binarity of good pleasure leading
to a greater perfection or evil pain leading to a lesser perfection, though he
also posits desire as a third primary affect whi lures us toward becoming
in the form of striving, impulse, appetite, and volition, a positing especially
relevant to his causal theory. ere is mu truth in this primarily dualistic
construction of the bodily affections, whi allowed the modern mind to
think philosophically about affect for the first time in any depth, though for
a twenty-first century sensibility informed by depth psyology and
modernist literature, the Ethics can oen seem like an artificial intelligence
aempting to comprehend human emotions, and only partially succeeding,
though all of the post-Hegelian philosophers discussed in the apters below
have contributed to the development of a more geometrically complex and
pluralist theory of affect for whi Spinoza’s theory created a primary
precondition.
Spinoza recognizes that affects are subjective modes, so that different
human bodies are affected in different ways by encounters with the same
things, and when these encountered objects are external to us, they are
constructed as images accessible to imagination. Memory is constituted in
the relational interconnection of these external images as ideas that correlate
with internal affections whi, unlike Cartesian reason, are confused as long
as they are discerned only in the mind, so that aention to internal affect,
“the duration of our body,” is required to render ideas “clear and distinct”28
as they are constructed for that particular body and its network of relations
to other bodies. Deleuze writes that Spinoza’s “entire philosophy is a
philosophy of ‘potentia,’ ”29 as the affects are real potencies, singular forces
or necessities whi we encounter in ourselves and with whi we must
contend, oosing how to relate to them through the moderating power of
the mind, liberating the body into free activity through adequate ideas of the
affects, or otherwise allowing them to rule us in passive bondage as mere
passions because of inadequate ideas. Affects are undeniable bodily and
imaginal realities whi cannot be merely repressed or eliminated, but
whi can be counteracted by opposite affects, so that if a sad affect
predominates, a joyful affect may be intellectually (i.e., consciously)
cultivated in order to render our bodies and minds active. e more we
become conscious of the affects in their complex differentiation, the more
active we become in their expression, whi is practically unlimited, as “no
one has yet determined what the body can do,”30 Spinoza recognizing a
radical openness to novel domains of experience and activity that Nietzse
would later embody in the figure of the Overman, a recognition, variously
evoked by all of the theorists below, that humanity is undergoing a process
of transformation into more profoundly individuated modes of existence
that have not yet been actualized.
Substance is that whi exists in itself, while intellect perceives the
essential forms of substances, affections express the modes of substances,
and God is the infinite substance with infinite aributes expressing an
infinite essence. While two substances can have completely different
aributes, and thus have no point of connection in experience, the
substances and aributes are always already integrated in the essential unity
of the world, and thus of God, for whom the apparently irreconcilable
differences of incommensurable aributes and discordant affects compose
the contrasting internal elements. All substances, all of the things whi
constitute the world, are infinite in that the cause of their being recedes
infinitely toward a transcendental divinity whi is never finally aainable,
but whi is the cause of everything. Efficient and formal causation are two
immanent modalities of a single essential substance, two finite descriptions
of an infinite God as a self-causing cause, and thus the finite expressions of
God are affirmations of the infinite essence, but they are negative in what
they exclude or deny in service to their differentiation, while the
transcendental divine whi they eternally approa is pure affirmation.
And the more perfectly beings approa the infinite, essential substance, the
more of reality they express, and therefore the more aributes and potency
they evince. God is both the efficient and formal cause of everything that
exists, two finite modes of thought, two parallel ways of expressing the
singular divine potency, so that “the order and connection of ideas is the
same as the order and connection of things.”31 Deleuze, both with and
without Guaari, designates this as a radical approa, for whi formal and
efficient causation, intensive idea and extensive substance, are two
immanent modes of expression for a unified “species of eternity”32 whi
exceeds them, and temporality itself, and thus the formal idea of the circle,
for one example especially relevant to the calculus invented by Leibniz with
its accompanying metaphysics, always recedes toward infinity as it is
approaed. And it is the same with the multiplicity of ideas whi compose
the human mind, whi eternally recede toward the infinite, univocal
substance at an always-unaainable transcendental horizon, and thus the
mind is constituted in the self-knowing of the infinite formal ideas,
corresponding acausally to the infinite essential substance in an absolute
parallelism, whi can be known by the third, intuitive kind of knowledge.33
While affirming material, efficient, and formal causation, Spinoza
dismissively rejects final causes, though the final causation he rejects is the
most naïve kind of teleology, more simplistic than the subtle, complex
finality that finds its nascent expression in Leibniz, and that is refined by all
of the theorists below. Spinoza’s rejection of “radical finalism,”34 Bergson’s
term for the more naïve form of teleology whi assumes a fixed, pregiven
end, may at first seem incompatible with his rejection of free will, as if the
entire history of the universe is perfectly and meanistically determined in
advance by efficient causes, it is just as susceptible to explanation by radical
finalism, for whi the end must be just as static and eternal as the origin.
For pure determinism, efficient and final causation are essentially
equivalent, two modes of description for a fixed, eternal blo universe
whi precludes real becoming, though Spinoza intimates a dissolution of
the duality of these two kinds of causation even as he rejects teleology, a
recognition whi may provide the key to overcoming the oen too-hasty
objections to his rejection of free will in a novel mode of thought developed
by most of the theorists below.
In fact, Spinoza rejects radical finalism in favor of something that looks
remarkably like the inclinational form of teleology variously evoked by
Leibniz and the others, for whi the affects that constitute the will are
determined, but the mind is free to oose at whi register to express these
affective potencies – a determinism of the will, but a “freedom of mind” – so
that, for instance, one cannot oose whether or not to feel anger, but one
can oose whether to express this affect destructively through violence or
creatively through energetically directed physical or intellectual activity.
is suggestion, that the disparate kinds of finalism conflated by Spinoza
must be differentiated, is a precondition for integrating Spinoza’s causal
theory with all of the other theorists discussed below, even Nietzse,
despite his notorious inconsistency, who warns in Beyond Good and Evil
against “superfluous teleological principles” like “the drive for self-
preservation,” a bemusing superfluity whi he ironically traces ba to
“Spinoza’s inconsistency” about final causation, while implicitly affirming
the will to power as properly teleological, not primarily as a will to
dominate, but as a will to potencies whi demand to be expressed one way
or another.35 Deleuze writes, in an essay on Spinoza, that affects “make us
conceive of suprasensible beings who would be their final cause,”36 though
as early as 1953 he writes, in his distinctly Bergsonian reading of Hume, that
this “purposiveness is more an elan vital, and less the project or the design
of an infinite intelligence.”37 Spinoza’s heirs have thus refined and extended
his causal theory, though Spinoza might reciprocally offer Bergson a more
subtle kind of formal causation than the naïve, Platonic formal theory that
Bergson rejects, so that one can discern Spinoza and Bergson as particularly
complementing one another’s limitations, constituted in what they deny, to
allow the affirmation of more subtle theories of both formal and final
causation than those they respectively reject.
e common conception of Spinoza as a pure determinist who simply
denies freedom of oice is a reductive misinterpretation, though an
understandable one given Spinoza’s somewhat confusing inconsistency on
this subject. Mu of the Ethics is devoted to meditations on how one can
oose to relate to the affects and, in fact, although Spinoza explicitly denies
final causation and affirms efficient and formal causation, mu of the book
implicitly affirms a more subtle form of teleology as affective inclination,
appetition, desire, temperament, and striving for self-preservation and
understanding, whi Spinoza defines as the essence of virtue, blessedness,
and freedom of mind. Despite Spinoza’s explicit rejection of teleology, this
conception is resonant with the more profound reimagining of final
causation affirmed by the other theorists, including Deleuze, perhaps
Spinoza’s most influential twentieth-century devotee, in his affirmation of a
“destiny” whi must be enacted in a lower or higher register, as opposed to
a static and pregiven fate. If Spinoza’s philosophy asserted the meanistic
determination of particular actualities, it would render all of his ideas about
how one can oose to relate to affects moot, as these relations themselves
would be predetermined in their particularity. Rather, it seems that Spinoza
is rejecting the radical finalism aracteristic of mu ancient and medieval
thought, whi is practically indistinguishable from a determinism based
solely on efficient causation for whi all movements down to the smallest
particle are predetermined for all time, in whi case explanations based on
efficient causation and radical finalism would be effectively equivalent.38
Both kinds of causation would just be inverse modes of cognizing a universe
whose moments always already exist as a fixed blo for whi there is no
real becoming, and thus whether these moments are pushed from the past or
pulled toward the future would ultimately be irrelevant, different ways of
explaining the same static reality that would render these two causal modes
practically identical.
Spinoza is evidently aer something more profound and paradoxical than
a mere meanistic or fatalistic determinism, as he describes freedom as a
being acting “from the necessity of its nature,”39 from its formal essence,
rather than from an external cause, whi he defines as bondage. As Deleuze
will render more explicit, the affects and the infinite formal potencies of
whi they are modes of expression are necessary and determined, but
determining the ways in whi those potencies and affects are expressed is
the ultimate task of the individual, so that liberating oneself from the
bondage of external causes through reason and knowledge of the affects in
order to express one’s essential nature is the primary activity of human life.
e potent affects that constitute our being are determined, but the degree of
consciousness that we bring to their moderate expression by means of
adequate ideas, our more-or-less profound conceptual constructions,
determines how they are expressed, whether through reactive hatred, envy,
and resentment or active justice, fairness, and love.
For Spinoza, this freedom of mind to oose the particular expressions of
affects is caused by God, who is the world in its totality and who himself
las free will, but who is nevertheless not subject to fate,40 so that it is the
world as a whole whi acts through us and whi constitutes our being in a
reciprocal relation between God and human, dissolving the usual opposition
between freedom and determinism. is binary is merely a partial verbal
construction of a reality whi exceeds it, an insight brilliantly, if obscurely,
proffered by Spinoza, as it would require several more centuries for others to
create the language and concepts to bring this mode of thought into fuller
actuality. In fact, although Spinoza writes that “all final causes are nothing
but human fictions,”41 some of his primary transtemporal peers, particularly
Leibniz, Deleuze, and Stengers, have affirmed that reality in the specific
forms in whi we encounter it, like the calculus, is itself “a convenient and
well-founded fiction,”42 a constructivist mode of thought whi Spinoza did
a great deal to render thinkable, obliquely anowledging that his
conception is a “construction.”43 Deleuze suggests that “constructivist logic”
specifically “finds its model in mathematics,”44 and like the infinitesimal
calculus whi is central to both Leibnizian and Deleuzean metaphysics,
Spinoza discerns that the divine immanent potency whi causes the will to
act is a transcendental domain of singular “metaphysical beings”45 whi
can never be finally aained.
is divine cause infinitely recedes as we approa it and, as with the
infinitesimal, whi is greater than zero but less than any positive number,
the mind inhabits a paradoxical interstice between determinism and
freedom, Spinoza employing the word “oose” to describe his composition
of this text, implicitly recognizing that we possess decisional freedom in
regard to the particular expressions of the affectively determined will.46 Like
the syncategorematic quality of the infinitesimal calculus, whi is
potentially infinite rather than absolutely infinite, the potentially infinite
mind effectively has freedom of oice, and is only determined in its abstract
ontological definition located at an always-receding horizon with an
“absolutely infinite”47 God. us, the duality of determinism and freedom,
like the dualities of finite and infinite or of continuity and discontinuity, is
dissolved in this more profound conception, Spinoza presciently presaging
the infinitesimal calculus several decades before its discovery by Leibniz.
e freedom to oose how one relates to the affects operates in a recursive
relationship with the affects that are acting on one’s mind, as we can
actively decide to aend to good things, for instance, in order to cultivate
joy so that we may be reciprocally determined by that affect. In this
paradoxical way, we are oosing, by means of aention, how the affects
determine us.48
According to Spinoza, “all things have been determined from the
necessity of the divine nature, not only to exist, but to exist in a certain way,
and to produce effects in a certain way,”49 but the particular expressions of
this certain way – the word “way” evidently indicating a manner or mode of
efficacy rather than a minutely specific given configuration – are variable
and susceptible to the freedom of mind, though this freedom itself is
paradoxically determined by the divine nature. e certain way in whi
everything occurs is determined, as “there is nothing contingent,”50 though
elsewhere Spinoza writes that “all particular things are contingent,”51 a
paradoxical contradiction whi leads to the more profound conception that
the particular actualities determined by certain ways of existing can be
osen through lower or higher registers of understanding, a Whiteheadian
“slightest ange of tone” intimating a dissolution of the oppositional duality
of determinism and freedom that will find a more fully elaborated
expression in Deleuze’s conception of differential repetition. Ea being is
determined by its nature to act in a certain way, but the order of expression
of this certain way is determined by the degree of that being’s
understanding, so that a person with a lesser understanding is acted upon by
the affective modes of potencies that determine the will and demand to be
brought into expression, while a person who strives to aieve a more
elevated understanding has power over the particular expressions of the
affectively determined will.52
e crux of the vexing question of Spinozan determinism is that
determinate necessity is not primarily discerned through efficient causation,
but especially in formal causation, as determination by formal necessity is
open to free expression as long as the essential nature is expressed in some
way, while efficient causation constitutes the more conventional kind of
determinism in whi ea minutely particular act is caused by the actions
of the previous moment, though these two causal modes are parallel,
constituting two different constructions of temporality.53 Spinoza
emphasizes that duration is not determined by efficient causation, a mode of
causal construction whi itself presupposes a linear conception of
temporality, but rather that “an indefinite duration” is transversally
determined through formal causation.54 A determination can be restrained
by a recollected image or by the idea of freedom, for instance, so this is
evidently not a meanistic efficient determinism, but a formal
determination in whi an essential nature can be variously expressed
through different particular acts,55 formal causation constraining oice to
an infinite variety of expressions within a thematic unity whose causal
efficacy is transversal rather than linear. Efficient causation is a parallel
surface effect of the deeper essential determination of the infinite divine
potency demanding expression, and thus the affective will is determined, but
the mind is free to oose the order and specificity of the actual expressions
of its formal nature.56
Notes
1. oted in Yovel, Spinoza, 5.
2. Deleuze, Essays, 138.
3. Deleuze, Expressionism, 180.
4. Antognazza, Leibniz, 168, 178; Jolley, Leibniz, 18.
5. Westphal, “Hegel,” 144.
6. Hegel, History (Brown), 155.
7. Sue Prideaux, Dynamite! 185.
8. James, Writings, 121.
9. Derrida, “Wander.”
10. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 327.
11. Spinoza, Works, 428.
12. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 17.
13. Deleuze, Essays, 21.
14. Deleuze, Foucault, 97.
15. Deleuze, Empiricism, 36.
16. Kerslake, Unconscious, 4–5.
17. Deleuze, Negotiations, 146.
18. Kerslake, Unconscious, 4–5.
19. Latour, Fragments, 33.
20. Deleuze, Letters, 88.
21. Kerslake, Immanence, 2; Spinoza, Works, 617.
22. Spinoza, Works, 460.
23. Deleuze, Expressionism, 236–7.
24. Spinoza, Works, 467.
25. Spinoza, Works, 472.
26. Deleuze, Expressionism, 248, 275, 335.
27. Deleuze, Expressionism, 223; Deleuze, Desert, 150, 153.
28. Spinoza, Works, 470–1.
29. Deleuze, Two, 191.
30. Spinoza, Works, 495.
31. Spinoza, Works, 597.
32. Spinoza, Works, 607.
33. Deleuze, Spinoza, 53–4; Deleuze and Guaari, Thousand, 253–4.
34. Bergson, Evolution, 45–50.
35. Nietzse, Beyond, 15; Deleuze, Two, 205.
36. Deleuze, Essays, 139.
37. Deleuze, Empiricism, 77.
38. Spinoza, Works, 544.
39. Spinoza, Works, 409.
40. Spinoza, Works, 439.
41. Spinoza, Works, 442.
42. Deleuze, Fold, 110; Deleuze, Empiricism, 80; Antognazza, Leibniz, 430.
43. Spinoza, Works, 441.
44. Deleuze, Empiricism, 87.
45. Spinoza, Works, 483.
46. Spinoza, Works, 543, 615.
47. Spinoza, Works, 409.
48. Spinoza, Works, 601–2.
49. Spinoza, Works, 434.
50. Spinoza, Works, 434.
51. Spinoza, Works, 472.
52. Spinoza, Works, 558.
53. Spinoza, Works, 436.
54. Spinoza, Works, 447, 499.
55. Spinoza, Works, 520.
56. Spinoza, Works, 439.
Chapter 3
Well-Founded Fictions
Gofried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Monadology

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-4

Academic journals were a new invention in Leibniz’s time, and although he

wrote several longer books, Leibniz preferred more concise formats,
publishing some of his most profound ideas, including the calculus, in
journals, and even in leers, maintaining a prolific correspondence. e
Monadology, wrien in 1714, was composed in just su a novel manner, not
in the form of a book, but in a brief series of highly concentrated notes
meant to serve as the basis for a poem by one of his regular correspondents.
And it is partially the fact that he did not intend it for publication that
makes this text so fascinating, allowing him to express his vast vision of the
world in condensed form, without the usual rhetorical concessions,
copiously fulfilling his formulation of twenty-eight years earlier that “an
intelligent author encloses the most of reality in the least possible compass.”1
e Monadology was startlingly novel when it was first published four years
aer Leibniz’s death at the beginning of the Enlightenment, but we can now
see in it a mode of thought that would come to be expressed in great depth,
not in all its details, but in different valences of its general trajectory by
Hegel, Selling, Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Stengers, all of whom
would explicitly engage with Leibniz’s concepts. Selling proclaims that,
aer what he portrays as the hollow and contemptible quality of solastic
theology, “it required nothing less than the entire stature of a Leibniz to
partially restore philosophy’s honor,”2 Whitehead that Leibniz “really did
inherit more of the varied thoughts of his predecessors than any man before
or since,”3 Stengers that Leibniz was “the philosopher who harmonized
apparently contradictory points of view,”4 and Deleuze that “perhaps no
other philosopher created so mu,” that “one has to follow in Leibniz’s
footsteps,” and thus “we all remain Leibnizian.”5
Although Leibniz does not extensively discuss mathematics in the
Monadology, the metaphysical system he outlines in this brief work is
intimately coextensive with his conception of the calculus, a mathematical
and conceptual narrative construction whi Deleuze describes as “adequate
to psyic meanics where Newton’s is operative for physical meanics,”
so that “the difference between the two is as mu metaphysical as it is
mathematical.”6 e integral calculus, whose roots in the thought of
Arimedes go mu further ba in history than the differential calculus, is
thus deeply intertwined with the conceptual integration for whi Leibniz
was a primary modern initiator.7 is philosophical integration is embodied
in the Leibnizian Calculemus (“Let us calculate”), whi Stengers recognizes
as the singular Leibnizian slogan, not as an exhortation to measuring,
adding, or comparing, but to “creating commensurability,” to negotiating
peaceful solutions to philosophical and practical controversies.8
is approa constitutes a mode of speculative philosophy that discerns a
fundamental correlation of conceptual and mathematical domains, as
Leibniz created his form of the calculus, distinguished from Newton’s
calculus particularly by the concept of the infinitesimal, during the same
years he was developing his metaphysical system, and the two endeavors
were part of what he conceived as a scientia generalis in whi all domains
of human knowledge could be integrated through analysis into fundamental
concepts and their combinatorial synthesis, formally mirroring the structure
of mathematical differentiation and integration. And this differentiating
integration is intimately bound up with Leibniz’s renewed conception of the
substantial forms derived from Aristotle and the solastics aer their
rejection by the Cartesians, but whi Leibniz, like Spinoza, came to
associate with the immanent active power of the conatus, the inclinational
striving for whi ea physical body is constituted in an “aggregate of
points” both containing and flowing from a metaphysical formal cause.
Leibniz likened this epiphany to one who, “having wandered for a long time
in a forest, suddenly emerges into an open field and against all hope finds
himself ba in the same place from whi he had first strayed,”9 an entrance
into an interior labyrinth, and a dialectical return to discover the traditional
conception of formal causes transformed through its resonance with the
calculus.10
Furthermore, as Simon Duffy explains, the two forms of integration
initiated by Newton and Leibniz, and developed by numerous others over
the succeeding centuries, contain a fundamental difference whi is essential
for the conceptual form of integration propounded by Leibniz, who
conceived of the integral calculus “as a method of summation in the form of
series, rather than the canonical approa that treats integration as the
inverse transformation of differentiation.”11 is canonical approa derived
from Newton, whi Deleuze and Guaari nominate “royal science,”12
renders differentiation primary and integration merely a formal
transformation of the procedure whi divides a curve into ever-smaller
linear segments to approximate the length of that curve. But whereas
Newton ultimately seled into a conception of these segments as finite,
Leibniz affirmed the concept of infinitesimals, the “well-founded fictions”13
of intensive, potential magnitudes whi are paradoxically less than any
positive number but greater than zero. Although the increasingly divided
linear segments can never become identical with the curve, they always
approa it so that, in Leibniz’s conception, infinitesimals are
syncategorematic – potentially infinite rather than absolutely infinite in that
they are always sufficiently miniscule to provide the solution to any given
problem, always receding as they are approaed. And thus, for all practical
purposes, the integration of these infinitesimal segments is precisely
equivalent to the curve, and their only difference from the curve itself is in
their abstract definition, whi can never be encountered in actuality, but is
a horizon whi always recedes as one approaes it. In fact, this form of the
calculus, whi was long denigrated in the primacy of the standard
Newtonian formulation employing limits, but whi reemerged as a deeper
approa developed by Abraham Robinson in the twentieth century, would
find perhaps its primary locus of efficacy in relation to nondifferentiable
fractal geometry. Although standard analysis has been extraordinarily
productive in the creation of the modern world, the nonstandard analysis
whi extends and makes rigorous the Leibnizian infinitesimal approa
renders visible a rier cosmos saturated by a more expansive multiplicity of
entities.14 And this conception serves to integrate continuity and
discontinuity, as the differentiation between the continuous curve and the
differential analysis of that curve into discontinuous segments is maintained
on one plane of description, but on another plane, they are effectively
indistinguishable, and thus these two planes of conceptual description are
themselves both differentiated and integrated by means of the metaphysical
correlate of the mathematical method for the summation of series.15
In the Theodicy, Leibniz asserts that “ultimately one should not doubt for
the sake of doubting: doubts should serve us as a gangway to get to the
truth,”16 a dictum that seems directly to answer the hermeneutics of
suspicion whi Derrida generally exemplified in its most subtle form.17
Leibniz was largely unconstrained by doubt in the texts wrien in his
sixties, including the Monadology, offering expansive and sweeping concepts
about the nature of being resonant with the infinitesimal calculus, at the
heart of whi resides his theory of monads, a term employed by the
Pythagoreans, derived from the Greek word for “unit,” “atom,” or
“singularity,” whi embody the differentiated integration of efficient and
final modes of causation. “e true atoms of nature,” monads are simple,
indivisible, imperishable, unalterable, unique substances created by God,
whi make up the world in all its profusion by aggregating into compound
entities, though monads possess qualities, and relate to one another through
their internal qualitative differences, whi allow for ange.18 As Duffy
observes, monads are the metaphysical correlate to the infinitesimals of the
calculus, “indivisible unities whose reality provides a metaphysical
foundation for maer while residing outside of the indefinite regress of parts
within parts.”19
 Although monads cannot be affected by other monads, they are
teleological enteleies whi contain an active force of appetition luring
continuous internal ange, and thus within ea infinitesimal monadic
unity resides an affective and relational plurality that can nevertheless not
be divided into component parts, whi Leibniz terms perception, a non-
meanical mode of becoming. All monads mirror all other monads in the
universe, and are thus pervasively interconnected,20 whi Hegel describes
as the “great thought” of monadic perception, “the intellectuality of all
things,”21 though he seems to have meant something closer to what we
would understand as the potential for mind in felt relationality, whi would
find perhaps its most direct descendent in Whitehead’s concept of
prehension. Composites of monads, constituted in their affective, differential
relationality, are organic or divine maines, ea of the parts of whi are
also organic maines, unmistakably fractal gardens within gardens,
fishponds within fishponds, receding through series of infinitely minute
compound entities, with all of reality vital and organismic at all levels, and
all bodies in constant flux. Leibniz goes so far as to assert that no organic
entity is ever really generated or annihilated, but rather that death is merely
an enfolding ba into the organic, affective relationality that constitutes the
world, and that birth is a transformation into a higher order in a
continuation of perpetual development. Out of the pre-mental affective
perceptions of these compound organic, divine maines can potentially
emerge apperception, the consciousness of rational human souls or minds,
from the deep sleep of unconscious monadic perception, and from the
unconsciousness of animal composites. ese minds are aracterized by
memory and reflexive self-awareness, and they are uniquely capable of
discerning eternal truths, whi are formal ideas in the mind of God, as our
minds mirror the infinite divinity by virtue of universal monadic
interconnection.
Implicit in this description of monads and their relations is the duality of
efficient and final causation, whi forms a site of integration. Efficient
causes are constituted in the infinite motions of material objects and their
physical relations, while final causes are the infinite inclinations of all
entities toward particular directions of temporal becoming, though the ends
are not predetermined, but are rather tendencies for ingression, a subtle
reframing of teleology that allows Leibniz, mu like Spinoza despite his
apparently opposed view on this subject, to reconcile final causation and
freedom of oice, though not of the will. e soul follows the laws of final
causes, while the body follows the laws of efficient causes, and although
these two causal domains are apparently independent, they are perfectly
correlated with one another through a preestablished harmony, an accord
whi renders final and efficient causation as two equally efficacious
explanatory modes for the intensive and extensive aspects of a single reality.
Most of the theorists below extend and refine this multicausal theory in
relation to a more subtle conception of final causes as inclinational
tendencies rather than as pregiven ends, as well as of formal causes as
dynamic relational potentialities and constraints rather than static
transcendent forms.
Leibniz asserts that there are infinite worlds, and he was perhaps
justifiably satirized by Voltaire for his extreme optimism that God has
osen “the best of all possible worlds,”22 an assertion whi Hegel calls
“lame and wearisome,”23 Whitehead designates “an audacious fudge
produced in order to save the face of a Creator,”24 and Deleuze finds “really
strange,”25 despite the deep admiration all three philosophers express for
their mutual precursor in other respects. is optimization hypothesis is an
overgeneralization of the principle of least action, so it is understandable
that Leibniz might have goen carried away in his extrapolation of this
limited optimization of refracted trajectories to the world in general given
the primary role he played in explaining this phenomenon through the
calculus, and Whitehead, the mathematician-turned-philosopher, would
explicitly reframe the principle of preestablished harmony in a deeper
register beyond universal optimization.26 Leibniz differentiated between
absolute and contingent necessity by means of the concept of the
infinitesimal central to the calculus: the absolute necessity of reality is the
infinity knowable only to God, while humans can only approa this
absolute through integration. However, as with the syncategorematic quality
of the Leibnizian calculus, this is apparently a distinction without a
difference because the infinitesimally differentiated elements can always be
further subdivided so that their discreteness becomes irrelevant at the scale
of any given process, and the two kinds of necessity can always be rendered
effectively equivalent, and only abstractly differentiated by virtue of their
respective continuity and discreteness, though their domain of difference is
an always-receding horizon. In this way, the very opposition between the
infinite and the finite is integrated in the emergent actuality of a
metaphysical operation whi precisely mirrors the calculus, but whi
nevertheless maintains the differentiation of mathematics and
metaphysics.27
For Leibniz, mu like Spinoza, humans act with freedom according to
their nature, but their nature is determined in an ultimately unreaable
infinite domain by God, a paradox whi is resolved through conceptual
integration, but whi also does not require the overgeneralized
optimization hypothesis. Monads ea inhabit a different perspective on the
world, and the infinite multiplicity of worlds is really constituted in
different, incompossible points of view of one universe, like views of a town
from every possible location. And thus the infinite differential relations of
affective monadic multiplicity find integration in this radically perspectival
theory of reality, whi contains both the pluralism of infinite possible
worlds and the monism for whi ea world is a different view of a single
plenum, in whi everything is alive and constantly anging, and in whi
everything relates to everything else through pervasive interconnection,
though ea soul only distinctly enfolds certain relations, while others are
indistinct, fading off into a shadowy penumbra, and the higher the soul, the
more of reality it enfolds.28
Notes
1. Leibniz, Discourse, 5.
2. Selling, Grounding, 97.
3. Whitehead, Modes, 3.
4. Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, 99.
5. Deleuze, Negotiations, 154–5; Deleuze, Fold, 158.
6. Deleuze, Fold, 112.
7. Strogatz, Infinite, 89.
8. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 399–401.
9. Antognazza, Leibniz, 251–2.
10. Duffy, Mathematics, 3.
11. Duffy, Mathematics, 162.
12. Deleuze and Guaari, Thousand, 363.
13. Antognazza, Leibniz, 430.
14. Duffy, Mathematics, 15.
15. See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Continuity”; Duffy,
Mathematics, 12, 15, 32, 35, 38.
16. Leibniz, Monadology, 245.
17. Derrida, Memoires, 259.
18. Leibniz, Monadology, 14–15.
19. Duffy, Mathematics, 39.
20. Leibniz, Monadology, 25.
21. Hegel, History (Haldane), 335.
22. Voltaire, Candide.
23. Hegel, History (Haldane), 340.
24. Whitehead, Process, 47.
25. Deleuze, Fold, 77.
26. Strogatz, Infinite, 118; Whitehead, Process, 27; Stengers, Thinking, 279.
27. Antognazza, Leibniz, 254–5; Duffy, Mathematics, 33.
28. Leibniz, Monadology, 24–6; Duffy, Mathematics, 33.
Chapter 4
e Life of the Whole
G.W.F. Hegel’s On Scientific Cognition

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-5

Hegel published The Phenomenology of Spirit, to whi “On Scientific

Cognition” is the Preface, in 1807, three years aer Kant’s death, definitively
taking up the mantle of German idealism through the intermediaries of
Fite and Selling. His complex relationship with his friend and rival
Selling is discussed in the apter on the slightly younger philosopher
below, and Hegel was deeply influenced by both Spinoza and Leibniz,
Selling writing that Hegel’s “entire system is Spinoza’s translated into
idealism.”1 Hegel’s expression, in 1812’s The Science of Logic, of affects “as
independent forces and powers” constituting the essential aracter of the
will, while thought constitutes the domain of freedom,2 is indeed
remarkably resonant with Spinoza given the Dut philosopher’s primary
influence on Nietzse and Deleuze, especially considering Deleuze’s
notoriously scathing critiques of Hegel. Hegel’s ambition throughout his
twenties was to be a “popular philosopher,” and it was only in his thirties,
largely under the influence of his friend Friedri Hölderlin, that Hegel
developed his more complex and difficult style, whi he thought was
necessary to push the concepts expressible by the current language to their
limit,3 ultimately becoming the “towering Master,”4 as Slavoj Žižek writes,
Marx’s “mighty thinker”5 in relation to whom mu subsequent philosophy
has defined itself. Hegel’s thought was so dominant in the nineteenth
century that it can seem almost commonsensical, despite the extreme
complexity of Hegel’s writing, to a sensibility informed by twentieth-
century continental philosophy, though this dialectical conception was
radically novel two centuries ago. e sense of self-evidence whi the
Hegelian dialectic may elicit in some readers is a testament to its
extraordinary success and ubiquity, though Hegel’s texts are amenable to
infinite interpretation, so although Hegel’s work constitutes a profoundly
influential and indispensable opening to an integrative mode of thought, it is
certainly not the final expression of su a mode, whi must perhaps
always be reserved for some future theorist.
While it is not necessary to enter fully into the legitimate critiques of
Hegel in this apter, as he will receive copious criticism below, especially
from Selling, James, and Deleuze, it does seem opportune to mention
Hegel’s relation to the calculus, whi he discusses in The Science of Logic.
Hegel, like Leibniz, conceived of his metaphysical system as intimately
related to the calculus, though he employs the more conventional version of
the integral calculus derived from Newton, whi constructs integration as
merely the inverse transformation of differentiation rather than as a method
for the summation of series, an approa whi resides at the heart of
Deleuze’s differential philosophy.6 However, this employment by Hegel of
the more standard version of the calculus does not render the dialectic
invalid, but allows for a different, and perhaps complementary, metaphysical
construction. Although the Deleuzean metaphysics based upon the
Leibnizian infinitesimal calculus may be more profound than the Hegelian
metaphysics based on the conventional Newtonian construction, despite
Leibniz’s considerable influence on Hegel, the dialectic remains a profoundly
useful mode of thought, eoing the limited and approximate aracter of
Newtonian dynamics in the twenty-first century, a mode surprisingly
resonant even with the theorists who are most critical of Hegel, so that the
reconciliation of opposites can eventually be resituated as a special case of
the integration of all kinds of difference, including opposition.7
Hegel spends the nearly six-hundred pages of the Phenomenology, of
whi the Preface was the last section composed – forty-five pages that Jean
Hippolyte, the Fren translator of this text, nominates as “perhaps the best
statement of Hegelian philosophy”8 – elucidating a dialectical logic closer to
the multivalent concept of Logos than to the formal logic of analytic
philosophy, an organismic logic of growth, becoming, and transformation
that evokes domains of process across scale that exceed the Aristotelian
tertium non datur, the law of excluded middle demanding either-or answers
to problematic questions. And in fact, the smooth infinitesimal analysis
developed in the 1960s would ultimately demonstrate the limits of this law
mathematically, though Hegel is ironically critical of the concept of the
infinitesimal.9 In the Logic, Hegel critiques the classic formulation of the
dialectic as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis articulated by Fite, writing
that “the name of synthesis, of synthetic unity, has rightly gone out of use.”10
Nevertheless, he describes a movement in whi an initial entity – for whi
consciousness is the primary order of aention in the Phenomenology, but
also emical reactions, organisms, philosophies, or social movements –
produces its own opposite, like a male ild born from the mother’s body,
and then the opposition, through long, complex tension, eventually
generates a reconciliation, out of whi a novel emergent entity is born.
Hegel warns that this triune structure must not be “reduced to a lifeless
sema, a mere shadow,” but must be conceived in its multifarious vitality
instead of as a Procrustean formula into whi one can cram the concrete
details of experience.11
In Hegel’s time as in ours, the conventional orthodoxy of philosophical
thought oen stakes out oppositional positions, sools defined against other
sools, becoming “fixated on the antithesis of truth and falsity,” aempting
logically and rationally to determine if one definite claim or its opposite is
true, whether manifested in the opposition of materialism and idealism, or
monism and pluralism. e assumption underlying this still-predominant
mode of philosophical activity is that if one’s argument is strong enough, the
critique of one’s opponent sufficiently devastating, then one can hope to
defeat one’s adversary, so that a system of philosophy can either be proven
as true or rejected as merely false through logical combat.12 However, Hegel
understood that whenever one sool of thought seems finally to have
demolished its opposing sool, to have salted its fields and le no one
standing, a small bud inevitably blooms forth that eventually, oen
cultivated in some obscure corner, comes raging ba to life, rising up to
allenge its hoary adversary once again in a new form. It may even be
claimed that every controversy in philosophical thought finds its origin, at
least in germ, in the work of ancient philosophers, leading ba to a
Deleuzean “dark precursor,”13 so that these conflicts between opposed
conceptual systems never seem completely to be resolved, eternally
returning in increasingly subtle and vexing ways.14
Hegel sought a larger coherence for whi the full array of philosophical
systems is not categorized and prepaaged as mere oppositional
disagreement, but rather traces “the progressive unfolding of truth,”15 a vital,
organismic process figured in the bud that “disappears in the bursting-forth
of the blossom,” for whi the fixed entity that we call “bud” no longer
exists, and in its place is a different entity known by the word “blossom.” For
the conventional logical mode, “one might say that the former is refuted by
the laer,” that the blossom negates the bud’s existence and that the two
forms are simply incompatible, though this way of thinking is obviously
absurd, as we know that the bud becomes the blossom, is the precondition
for the blossom’s emergence, and that they are both the same plant in
different guises, at different stages of their becoming. But for traditional
modes of logic based on the tertium non datur, how could one explain that
where there was a bud, now there is a blossom?16 Hegel recognized that
conventional logic is inadequate for describing the living reality in whi we
are immersed, and provided an alternative to this logical mode that had
become so aracteristic of philosophical thought by the early nineteenth
century, and whi is in fact still largely dominant in analytic philosophy,
though this dominance may be waning, for one primary instance in Robert
Brandom’s work on Hegel.17 For Hegel, it is partially true that blossom
negates bud, but it is also true that one flows into the other as a continuous
unity for whi they are not opposed but mutually necessary, so that the
moments of an organismic process can be in real opposition on one level of
description while also containing, and being contained within, a deeper
complementarity in whi they are essential moments in a process of
becoming, and in whi “this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of
the whole.” is process of transformation and becoming occurs in domains
across scale, from the conception, birth, and development of an organism, to
the psyological development of an individual, to the philosophical
development of a concept, to the complex becomings of social, political,
scientific, and religious movements.18
Even the development of the concept of dialectic itself is mediated
through a dialectical process as, for Hegel, it is naïve and inexperienced
philosophers who think primarily through oppositions, who seek to define
themselves against some alternate philosophical sool.19 But this opposition
is also aracteristic of a certain stage of culture, whi reiterates (in a way
that Hegel might have called “fractal” if that geometry had existed in his
time) the development of individuals, who necessarily progress along the
same successively organized “formative stages”20 through whi the
developmental process of history has already passed. Not only must ea
philosopher begin their career by defining themself against an opposed
philosophy, but Hegel also discerns this oppositional mode, aracteristic of
what we might recognize as an exclusivist modern rationality defined by its
disqualification of nonrational modes, as a stage in a process of becoming.
Hegel can thus be understood, along with Spinoza and Leibniz, as a primary
initiator of the mode of thought that would inevitably come aer the
modern: not “postmodernism” as exemplified by Derridean deconstruction,
whi may be understood as a clearing of the stage (or perhaps a
dismantling of the stage itself), but a novel mode that does not name itself as
coming aer what it supplants, rather absorbing the modern into a more
expansive mode with its own original nomination, enabled by the
transitional postmodern dissolution, as Newtonian meanics would become
a special case of relativity. Ea individual must pass through a microcosm
of the trajectory undertaken by human culture, rediscovering the stages
through whi culture has already passed on a path “made level with toil,”21
so that the many philosophers, perhaps still the majority, who engage
primarily in the oppositional, exclusively rationalist mode of thought, are
enacting the refinement of a necessary stage of process that Hegel indicates
the way beyond, distilling this mode down to its essence in preparation for
integration with more aracteristically nonmodern modes of thought.
Dialectical logic describes the movements of vital processes across scale,
so that organisms, individual consciousnesses, social movements, and
philosophies begin with an undifferentiated unity, a potential subject that
becomes actual through a self-positing, through the movement of exceeding
its originary simple unity, itself the result of a previous dialectical process,
and relating to itself in a self-othering whi mediates a relational
becoming.22 For example, an infant’s consciousness, initially containing no
self-awareness, an undivided unity of pure sensation, is teleologically
impelled to become aware of itself as an entity separate from the world it
encounters. is self becoming conscious of itself is constituted in a negation
of the original unity of consciousness whi, like the bud, is lost in the
blooming awareness of the ild, constituting an oppositional doubling so
that as we age, we relate to the initial, pure self in various ways, at first
simply becoming conscious that we are a being with various sensations and
impulses, and then learning to relate to that originary self as an other.23
rough this self-relational reflection, the initial, undifferentiated self is
transformed in reciprocal negotiation with self-consciousness of its own
internal otherness, as the truth of this process is not found in the originary
unity, but in the process of reconciling the self that observes with the self
that simply is prior to observation, mediating its becoming through a “circle
that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and
only by being worked out to its end, is it actual.”24 is dialectical process is
the movement of pure potentiality becoming actual, the relational tension of
the original self with its own self-consciousness, or of the philosophical
movement with its antithetical movement, whi transforms the entity
emerging from this relation, whether the individual person or the
philosophical milieu.
Applying Hegelian terms to a movement that came long aer him, but
whi he seems to have intimated in its broad outlines, deconstruction is an
almost pure expression of the negative, a negativity beyond even the
Hegelian negative, the moment in the dialectic when the original unity, the
modern, rationalist, logocentric mode of thought, itself the product of an
earlier dialectical process, becomes other than itself and rejects its original
being, going deeply into the domains of reality that the initial positing had
repressed. Hegel describes this stage of the dialectic as “tarrying with the
negative,” and we can recognize deconstruction as the “uer
dismemberment” of privileging oppositions, including the opposition of
unity and oppositionality itself. Deconstruction has carried the oppositional
mode aracteristic of modern rationality to its logical conclusion,
employing this mode against itself, enacting the Hegelian negative in the
death of the modern for whi deconstruction is both the completion and
the dissolution.25
However, Hegel understands that this death is not a closure whose
complementary opening into a novel epo cannot be wrien, as it seems to
Derrida, as only the death of one stage of a process can lead to a rebirth, and
renascence is always the product of an integration of moments whi were
previously incommensurable, so that Hegel can write that “this tarrying
with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.”26 It is the
encounter with the negative other that mediates the originary positing’s
ingression from potentiality into actuality, a spiral circulation that, for
instance, impels ildren to differentiate from their parents, the familiar
adolescent rebellion that allows the ild to become an individual in their
own right rather than merely an extension of the family. And though there
are those who never exceed this stage of differentiation, of the rejection and
critique of the family from whi they emerged, the individual can only
become a mature adult by reconciling with their parents, or at least their
imago (to smuggle in a Jungian term), aer having rebelled against them, for
as long as they define themselves against their parents, they are still in their
thrall, still being psyologically dominated by what they reject, still
clinging to a partial view of reality against its opposite conception.
is circular reconciliation or sublation is paradoxically a liberation from
the original familial matrix through an embrace of the partial validity of
that originary mode by an individuated self, “the whole whi, having
traversed its content in time and space, has returned into itself,”27
transformed by this process of differentiation and reintegration, aaining an
emergent wholeness that contains the partiality of both the original
simplicity and its antithetical negation, both theism and atheism to frame
the dialectic in religious terms. e result of this long process of
differentiation and reconciliation is a mature truth more profound than the
initial simplicity, though the final form of the sublation is not the “real” form
of the initial potentiality any more than is the original positing.28 e truth
of an entity is not to be found only in the origin or end of its process of
becoming, but in the entire complex trajectory that leads to the emergent
entity through the reconciliation of its opposed moments, as the concrete
details of ea moment, whi were emphasized at their peak of efficacy,
sink into the baground as integral parts of the entity, losing something of
their vivid urgency, but still forming essential elements of the whole.29 For
Hegel, the moment of sublation has the aracter of a liberated self-
conscious peace whi rejects nothing,30 and whi has become other than
what it was in the beginning, so that by dwelling with this tension endemic
to its own self-relation, it has produced a harmonious and veracious
integration of its seemingly incommensurable and contradictory moments, a
process whi Hegel sums up in the unaracteristically pithy adage: “Truth
is its own self-movement.”31
Even the emergent result is not a fixed end, but is immediately drawn
ba into the stream of becoming as a novel positing in a more expansive
domain of opposition, and thus does the teleological impulse toward polarity
issuing into reconciliation drive the successive self-overcomings through the
graduated stages of development that constitute disparate processes across
scale. e dialectic can be discerned in the consummation of sexual
reproduction, in whi the opposite sexes are drawn to one another in
relations that are by turns harmonious and discordant to produce a third
entity, the ild that embodies a seamless integration of the two parents, and
whi itself is capable of eventually producing a further emergence from
opposition by producing a ild through su consummation.32 And like a
newborn ild, a bare philosophical principle is only an incitement to
activity, is only a potentiality until it goes through decades, generations, or
even centuries of expression in relation to concrete experience, receives
critiques and refutations that provoke its refinement and expansion, until the
initial conception is developed into a mature, nuanced system of thought.
Even when philosophies seem starkly opposed with no common ground,
they are really participating in one stage of a larger dialectical becoming,33
as whether they know it or not, the fiercely antagonistic debaters are,
through their tension, contributing to the production of a mode of thought
whi transcends them both, perhaps bending one another’s beliefs slightly,
imperceptibly toward the other, forcing them to discern the lacunae and
margins of their theory, oen creating the precondition for an integration
that only takes place long aer the two interlocutors are dust. But lest one
think this failure to produce a final reconciliation is a tragedy, Hegel
anowledges that even the greatest philosophers can at best exemplify and
enact one moment in the grand dialectic that encompasses the vast sweep of
history.34
Holding the negative pole of the opposition in intimate relation with the
initial one-sidedness of any positing, rather than repressing the negative as
other, is a necessary moment of the dialectic, struggling not only with
external foes, but with the internal conflict externalized through projective
enactments.35 Maintaining the opposites in tense relation clarifies and
refines the positions, a discordant containment whi oen, of its own
accord, reveals that the two positions are not actually opposed, but are both
partial aspects of a larger reality, whi Hegel describes as a novel identity
that emerges from the process. e resolution of a persistent controversy in
philosophy is almost always found in the recognition that the two sides
were too shallow in their formulations, their encounter producing a mutual
deepening that discovers, usually surprisingly, agreement in this more
profound domain of discourse, an insight perhaps even relevant to the
controversy between Hegelians and Sellingians, or Hegelians and
Deleuzeans. Truth is generally partial, and the opposite of a truth is almost
never a mere falsehood if the two positions are, over time, brought into
greater nuance and complexity of expression through their mutual
engagement.36 e deeper one enters into the nuances of an opposition by
engaging with the negative of one’s own conscious position, the more one’s
thinking is transformed until the opposition is no longer relevant, is a relic
of an earlier stage that one now sees through, but whi nevertheless had to
be lived through moment by moment, year by year, in order for it to be
sublated and overcome.37 e conflicts that seemed burningly important to
us in our youth oen appear trivial or reductive in retrospect, and the same
is oen true of earlier stages of culture, as the controversies that engaged our
ancestors can seem inconsequential and easily resolved, though we also
certainly have mu to learn from nonmodern modes that have been
disqualified in the differentiation of the modern. is dialectic traces a
movement toward self-consciousness, as ea reconciled opposition expands
one’s conscious view of the world by absorbing that whi was previously
experienced as other in the formation of a differentiated unitary structure,
thereby deepening and complicating both elements in the opposition
through their sublation in a novel entity, a emical reaction that produces a
new substance with unforeseen properties.38
But this knowledge only comes from living through the tension, as one
cannot rush an emergence through the dialectical movement any more than
one can rush the growth of a ild, though one can inhibit su an
emergence by refusing to bend, dogmatically refusing to take in the partially
valid perspective that one encounters in the other.39 Su a totalitarian
rejection of a novel element, constituted in the suppression of the other,
whether in the form of a novel concept or a minority group, is generally
motivated by the fear that one’s freedom and power will be eclipsed by that
external opponent, and this fear is justified in a limited way, as the bud
must, in one sense, die for the blossom to be born, and the doxa in any
domain must pass away in order for a heterodox mode to arise out of its
ashes, even the orthodoxies defended by Hegelians, Sellingians, or
Deleuzeans.40 But even if an individual or a collective organization rigidly
refuses to be transformed, this rigidity oen generates a compensatory drive
toward transformation in those that this entity encounters, so that an
authoritarian father oen produces ildren who rebel in more extreme
ways than the ildren of more moderate parents, for instance, driving a
ild raised in a conservative religious family into an atheistic, scientistic
mode of thought. And then the ild of that rebellious ild, now the parent,
may seek a reconciling middle position between the atheistic mode and the
theistic mode that the parents rejected. Or similarly, a particularly repressive
and authoritarian regime, like that found by Jesus of Nazareth in the
Romans, or by Nicolaus Copernicus in the medieval Chur, oen produces
a revolutionary reaction that does not only reject the oppressive regime, but
ultimately transforms that regime, so that over the course of centuries, the
teaings of the provincial rabbi become the dominant religion of the
empire, with the capital city of that empire becoming the world center of the
previously upstart religious movement that rebelled against it. And once
that religion has become a vast empire in its own right, not primarily
political (though the Chur has certainly been political), but an empire of
the spirit and mind, we again find an upstart, marginal movement initiated
by Copernicus, and carried on nearly a century later by Kepler and Galileo,
that eventually comes to supplant the Christian religion as the dominant
mode of thought in the West, serving not only as a political force or a
system of belief (though science is certainly both of these things), but also as
a method for understanding and shaping the world. Ea of these empires
was uerly transformed by what it repressed, the other ultimately returning
to rest at the heart of these systems, with both the initial system and its
negative integrated in the process.
Like empires, religions, or sciences, conceptual thought is open to being
transformed by the other when consciousness understands that this
encounter with otherness, this becoming-other, is an essential moment in a
process of individuation.41 But this openness to the other can be painful, as
the upheaval and uncertainty of transformation are oen more difficult than
the static certainty of adhering to a fixed, supposedly complete system,
whether political, religious, scientific, or philosophical. Eventually, however,
those elements that are repressed, whether in an individual consciousness or
in a culture, rise up against that fixed structure, and the more rigid and
oppressive it has become, the more destructive the revolution will be before
a novel integration can occur. Of course, as seen in many revolutions,
perhaps most notoriously in the Fren Revolution and in the Communist
revolutions in China and Russia, the revolutionaries can be just as rigid in
their ideologies, so a radical openness to the other is required not only by
the ones in power, but also by those who seek to upset the balance of power
if they hope to aieve a novel mode of relation rather than merely a
reversal of the privileging opposition in whi what was repressed now itself
becomes the agent of repression.
But then again, this reversal can also act as a transitional step in a
dialectic luring process ever onward toward reconciliation, as it is only
through experience, even the experience of self-alienation, whi seems so
empty, hopeless, and devoid of meaning in the throes of its despairing
moment, that our modes of thought, on both individual and collective scales,
are deepened and expanded. It is the tension between self and other that
impels becoming, as this encounter with the alien, the other, death, the
negative, the shadow, and the void, all various nominations for the
unconscious elements repressed in the positing of the original entity, drives
the teleological movement toward more encompassing modes through the
integration of that whi is unconscious or experienced as external to the
conscious, subjective identity. e individual or collective seeks out, draws
toward it, or otherwise elicits from external experience that whi is
repressed, rejected, or disqualified in the formation of its own self-
conception.42 For Hegel, this pervasive urge to go through the dialectic in all
its multifariousness is the essence of what it means to be human, a being
whose nature is “to press onward to agreement with others” in order to
generate “an aieved community of minds,” an integration of all modes of
thought serving as the teleological purpose toward whi philosophy is
inexorably lured.43 And with the moment of sublation and emergent
reconciliation, “the Phenomenology of Spirit is concluded,”44 for rather than
experiencing the opposed moments of its development as separate, as subject
and object, self and other, the emergent entity, whether in the guise of an
individual or a cultural consciousness, viscerally understands that ea of
these moments is a part of itself because it has lived through these moments,
it has been them and seen them pass away like the leaves whi fall from
the tree only to become part of the soil that feeds further arborescent growth
and development. True knowledge is not the self knowing the world as
something external and other, but knowing the world as an intimate aspect
of its own interiority, incorporated through the fraught encounter with
otherness, a conception whi forms a primary precondition for mu
subsequent philosophy.45
Notes
1. Selling, Grundlegung, 235.
2. Hegel, Logic, 15.
3. Pinkard, Hegel, 46–7.
4. Žižek, Organs, 51.
5. Marx, Capital I, 103.
6. Hegel, Logic, 234–59.
7. Duffy, Mathematics, 166–7, 172; Duffy, Expression, 58–63, 73–5.
8. Hippolyte, Logic, 4.
9. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Continuity”; Hegel, Logic, 79,
252–3.
10. Hegel, Phenomenology, 72.
11. Hegel, Phenomenology, 29.
12. Hegel, Phenomenology, 2.
13. Deleuze, Difference, 119.
14. Hegel, Phenomenology, 36.
15. Hegel, Phenomenology, 2.
16. Hegel, Phenomenology, 2.
17. Brandom, Spirit.
18. Hegel, Phenomenology, 2.
19. Hegel, Phenomenology, 2.
20. Hegel, Phenomenology, 16.
21. Hegel, Phenomenology, 16.
22. Hegel, Phenomenology, 10, 14.
23. Hegel, Phenomenology, 10.
24. Hegel, Phenomenology, 10.
25. Hegel, Phenomenology, 19.
26. Hegel, Phenomenology, 19, 36.
27. Hegel, Phenomenology, 7.
28. Hegel, Phenomenology, 43.
29. Hegel, Phenomenology, 7.
30. Hegel, Phenomenology, 12.
31. Hegel, Phenomenology, 28.
32. Hegel, Phenomenology, 11.
33. Hegel, Phenomenology, 13.
34. Hegel, Phenomenology, 45.
35. Hegel, Phenomenology, 13; Kelly, Individuation.
36. Hegel, Phenomenology, 23.
37. Hegel, Phenomenology, 16.
38. Hegel, Phenomenology, 17.
39. Hegel, Phenomenology, 17, 23.
40. Hegel, Phenomenology, 35.
41. Hegel, Phenomenology, 20.
42. Hegel, Phenomenology, 21.
43. Hegel, Phenomenology, 43.
44. Hegel, Phenomenology, 21.
45. Hegel, Phenomenology, 22.
Chapter 5
God-Positing Potencies
F.W.J. Selling’s Berlin Lectures

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-6

e two series of lectures discussed in this apter, The Grounding of

Positive Philosophy and Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of
Mythology, were given in Berlin starting in 1842 when Selling was sixty-
seven, published in the years following his death in 1854, and only
translated into English in 2007. Selling’s late work can be conceived as
providing a way beyond the Hegelian dialectic, whi nevertheless is deeply
indebted to that mode of thought, so that while Hegel’s first book initially
positioned him as Selling’s follower, despite the fact that he was five years
older than his university roommate, posterity has generally judged that it is
with the Phenomenology that Hegel definitively surpassed his friend as the
leading figure in German philosophy. However, aer being almost forgoen
in the long shadow cast into the twentieth century by Hegel, Selling’s
later work was reexamined as a way potentially to go beyond Hegel, first by
Heidegger in a series of 1936 lectures (though it was only published in the
1970s), and then by Karl Jaspers, Jürgen Habermas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
and Walter Sulz in the 1950s, and by Deleuze and Žižek in later decades.
Both of the primary narratives about the relation between Selling and
Hegel contain partial truth, and can be integrated to compose a more
expansive narrative in whi Selling was surpassed by Hegel in certain
ways in the early nineteenth century, but in whi Selling also offers an
essential critique of his friend’s work, as well as his own novel conceptual
contributions, that have enabled philosophy ultimately to go beyond Hegel
while retaining and recontextualizing his epoal mode of thought.
ere is no doubt that Selling is brilliant, though in 1809’s Of Human
Freedom, the last work he published during his lifetime, considered his

masterpiece by some,1 one suspects that he is trying to prove that he is as

brilliant as his friend and former supporter Hegel, whose Phenomenology
was published two years earlier, initiating the ri between them. Selling
evidently wants to demonstrate that he is an equal to his old lieutenant, who
would become the most influential philosopher in the nineteenth century,
but he is apparently driven by this willful desire to begin to articulate a
critique of the Hegelian dialectic, a way beyond the dialectic’s eventual
near-hegemony, though he could only evoke it, gesture toward it.2 A fully
articulated critique of Hegel would only be possible aer significantly more
time had passed, and the dialectic had been integrated and rendered almost
commonsensical among many philosophers, so that the ultimate self-
immolating critique of the dialectic could only emerge a century-and-a-half
later in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Although Of Human Freedom is
perhaps an implicit response to Hegel, Selling waited until 1834, three
years aer Hegel’s death, explicitly to criticize his former friend,3 at least in
public, whi is a bit pusillanimous given Hegel’s inability to answer these
criticisms, as there were twenty-four years between the publication of the
Phenomenology and his passing when Selling could have engaged in
critical dialogue with his friend’s work. Hegel has usually been judged by
posterity to be the more overwhelmingly potent thinker, or at least more
successful in propagating his undoubtedly more consistent and coherent
theory as the greatest monument of his philosophical era, while Selling
evinces a gloriously inconsistent and profligate creativity not as evident in
Hegel.4
Although Selling makes some important refinements and extensions to
the Hegelian dialectic, one is frankly hard-pressed to recognize the full
scope, depth, and complexity of Hegel’s work in Selling’s critique, and
Selling’s aracterization of Hegel’s philosophy as primarily negative in
the Grounding, an evaluation later taken up by Deleuze, is misleading.
Although the negative is certainly an essential moment of the dialectic, it
constitutes the struggle, opposition, labor, and ordeal necessary for
overcoming a particular phase of process, the death and dismemberment
required for a positive rebirth into a novel emergent domain. Negative and
positive are intimately entwined in the dialectic, and the primary content
whi Hegel posits, his primary contribution to a positive philosophy, is the
dialectical movement itself.5 As James writes, describing his experiments
with nitrous oxide intoxication: “What reader of Hegel can doubt that that
sense of a perfected Being with all its otherness soaked up into itself, whi
dominates his whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in
his consciousness of mystical moods,” positive intimations of “potential
forms of consciousness entirely different” from “our normal waking
consciousness,” whi contain a “metaphysical significance” whose primary
feature is the “reconciliation” of “the opposites of the world.”6 Contrary to
Selling’s oen dismissive evaluation of Hegel as a mere logical rationalist,
as expressing “a pathetic reason” only concerned “with a imera,”7 there is
indeed an organismic quality to Hegel’s thought whi sometimes verges on
mysticism, though of a more monistic kind than that of Selling.8
It might be suggested that what is important in Hegel is not primarily the
concept of the absolute, whi is yoked to a monocentric mode of
consciousness aracteristic of monotheism, or the assertion that Hegel’s
system is complete and final, whi it clearly is not9 (despite Hegel’s
insistence in the Logic that the dialectic “is the one and only true method”10),
but his positive articulation of the dialectical movement itself, whi
contains a powerful, though limited, explanatory efficacy for processes
across scales and orders, not only in human consciousness, but in the
domains accessible to biology, emistry, sociology, and history. And
because of its explanatory power, whi still partially accounts for even the
current movements and countermovements in philosophy, politics, and
culture, it required about a century for the recognition to emerge broadly
among philosophers (though certainly presaged by Selling and Nietzse)
that there are other modes of relation not susceptible to an oppositional
mode of dialectical explanation.11
One can certainly understand why Selling avoided engaging in direct
conflict with his friendly rival given the overwhelming potency of Hegel’s
thought, despite its limitations, and it is especially in Selling’s philosophy
of mythology that he provides a profound complement to Hegel’s dialectical
conception, ultimately anowledging the partial validity of that conception,
while expressing a novel mode of thought whi is essential to the
developments traced in the apters below. As with the other
complementary dyads discussed in the present text (Spinoza-Leibniz,
Spinoza-Bergson, Hegel-James, Freud-Jung, Hegel-Deleuze, Derrida-
Deleuze), Selling and Hegel can be understood as expressing correlative
aspects for their era of a still more expansive mode that would only begin to
find an integral expression in the twentieth century, a project that continues
to be carried forward in the twenty-first century. In a lecture on Selling’s
philosophy in 1826, Hegel writes that, although Selling “never managed to
aieve a popular appeal,” his philosophy begins with “intellectual intuition”
and “the power of imagination”12 in order speculatively to resolve antitheses
in a transcendental idealism concerned especially with formal potencies
discerned in nature and mythology. Hegel was critical of this conceptual
complex, despite his affirmation of affective powers whi constitute the
will, though Selling’s conception of agential potencies forms the primary
complement to the Hegelian dialectic for our narrative, especially in the
extensive employment of the figures of mythology by Nietzse, Jung,
Deleuze, and Hillman, all of whom were influenced by Selling. Deleuze
contends that “the most important aspect of Selling’s philosophy” is “his
consideration of powers,” the mythological potencies, a mode of thought
through whi Selling, in contrast with Hegel, “brings difference out of the
night of the Identical” by means of “a differential calculus adequate to the
dialectic” derived especially from Leibniz.13
In the Grounding, Selling explicates the dualistic historical relation of
what he terms negative and positive philosophy, whi, despite his harsh
critiques of Hegel, looks remarkably like a dialectical process, though when
differentiated from Selling’s more excessive denouncements, these
critiques serve as refinements and extensions of Hegel’s approa, whi
opens into Selling’s theory of potencies, abstractly explicated in this text,
and delineated in a more specific mode in relation to polytheism in the
Introduction. In fact, the Hegelian dialectic is partially derived from the

early work of Selling himself,14 whi in turn is partially derived from

Fite, so it is no surprise that Selling employs a mode of thought that
looks strikingly Hegelian to posterity, and it is also unsurprising that he
transparently resents Hegel for appropriating one of his most profound
concepts, itself partially appropriated from Fite, and elaborating it in a
more fully realized, and popularly successful, way. Despite his resentment of
Hegel, Selling affirms that the development of the mode of thought he
traces from Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle through Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant,
and Fite “cannot be the work of one person, of one individual, and, for
that maer, not even of one epo,” and the apters below trace the
continuation of this collective endeavor into the twenty-first century.15
Ultimately, it must be recognized that the dialectic whi came to be
called Hegelian is the collective creation of this lineage of philosophers
culminating in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the
wake of Kant in Germany. ey all expressed different and complementary
aspects of the dialectic, and Selling’s critique and extension of the dialectic
into the series of polytheistic potencies of mythology is itself partially
explicable in dialectical terms, while also making possible the deeper form of
the dialectic expressed most completely over a century later by Deleuze, so
that the young Fiteans Selling and Hegel produced a novel expression of
this mode of thought aer its initial positing by Fite, whi itself was the
result of a dialectical process. And then from the new positing of
Sellingian philosophy, Hegel became other than this identity,
differentiating himself from Selling, a dialectical self-othering of this
collective movement whi allowed Selling, over thirty years later, to
produce a further differentiation, taken up and further refined and
differentiated more than a century later by Deleuze, so that it is only in our
time another half-century aer Deleuze that it may be possible to enact a
differentiated dialectical integration of Hegel and Selling through the
Deleuzean intermediary.16 Although Selling presents his positive
philosophy as a rejection of Hegel, he expresses a dialectical conception very
close to Hegel in certain respects, so that Selling’s real innovations on
Hegel’s system are more shis of emphasis away from logic and toward
nature and experience, though these are certainly present in Hegel as well.
Selling’s primary innovation, whi is more radical than these other shis
of emphasis, is the theory of potencies, whi serves the same role as the
absolute in Hegel, and in Selling’s early work, opening the dialectical
mode of thought from a monocentric consciousness to a polycentric mode
whi will be greatly elaborated by Nietzse, Jung, Deleuze, and Hillman.17
e passage in the Phenomenology that initiated the decades-long
controversy between Hegel and Selling concerns Hegel’s critique of a
simplistic conception of the absolute as “the night in whi, as the saying
goes, all cows are bla,” whi he describes as “cognition naïvely reduced to
vacuity.”18 Selling interpreted this passage as a veiled aa on his work,
but when he asked his friend about this critique, Hegel claimed it was a
response to reductive interpretations by some of Selling’s followers, “the
abusers and the aerers,” as Selling puts it, though as Selling notes,
“this distinction is not made in the text.” Nevertheless, as John Laughland
observes, “although he was very hurt by Hegel’s perceived aa,” whi is a
relatively mild and subtle conceptual disagreement compared to the
sustained vitriol Selling would hurl at Hegel aer his friend’s death, “it
jolted him into making further anges to his philosophical system,” whi is
“doubtless because Hegel had hit his mark,”19 though Heidegger disagrees.20
In fact, the controversy continues between the oen fixed camps of
Hegelians and Sellingians, enacting a differentiating opposition whi it
was a primary project of both philosophers to overcome, at least in its more
abstract valences.
Nevertheless, over thirty years later in the Grounding, Selling, still
evidently incensed over Hegel’s indirect critique, and apparently reacting
not only to Hegel’s superior philosophical eminence, but also to aggressive
aas by some of Hegel’s most vociferous followers – whom he describes
as thoroughly “deplorable” and “ildishly delighted” with their “platitudes
and slogans”21 – suggests that although he has been accused of merely
rejecting the negative philosophy, and thus Hegel, in favor of a positive
philosophy, in fact Hegel “wants to be positive,”22 but does not even aieve
a negative philosophy, let alone a positive one. Rather, Hegel ignobly seeks
to carry the negative beyond its limits of efficacy in his “false system”23
whi is “totally devoid of intuition,”24 giving in to the “temptation to break
into the territory of the positive,”25 indulgently wallowing in a “misguided”26
and “miserly” logical dogmatism whi “is the most repugnant form of any
dogmatism,”27 and whi is “hostile to all that is meaningful and inspired.”28
However, this ironically immoderate dismissal of Hegel as immoderate,
ignoble, misguided, miserly, repugnant, pathetic, unintuitive, uninspired,
meaningless, and generally wrong-headed is not supported by a careful
reading of Hegel’s actual work, whi continues to be profoundly influential.
It seems, rather, to be the result of a resentful and inconsistent Selling
(despite his dubious claims of consistency), still embroiled in the personal
controversies permeating his relationship with his old friend even a decade
aer Hegel’s death, evidently projecting onto Hegel qualities that could
perhaps more accurately be aributed to Selling himself, or perhaps to his
unconscious fears about himself aer having spent half his life in his early
supporter’s shadow, and not having published any major works for over
three decades, recalling Jung’s insight that we tend to be most troubled in
others by the things that most trouble us about ourselves. Although
Selling aptly affirms that aention to felt experience can guard against the
“unnatural” and “artificial” quality that he unfairly aributes to Hegel’s
work, this aribution is ironic given that Selling’s writing is at least as
“laborious and unclear”29 as Hegel’s, as Selling describes his friend’s
compositions. A few pages later, however, Selling, apparently in a more
conciliatory mood, describes Hegel as a “powerful thinker,” instead blaming
Hegel’s students for misunderstanding and insulting Hegel, even as they
praise him with “melodramatic phrases,”30 whi is again ironic given the
manic melodrama exclusively directed toward Hegel that pervades
Selling’s otherwise brilliant lectures.
In a definitive evaluation, Stephen Houlgate writes that although
“Selling’s interpretation of the Logic has been hugely influential”31 on
continental philosophers from Kierkegaard, Nietzse, and Heidegger to
Lévinas, Derrida, and Deleuze, this “interpretation is, to say the least,
cavalier,”32 as Selling “passes judgment on Hegel’s system on the basis of
certain assumptions about thought and existence that Hegel does not share,”
and “those very assumptions lead him seriously to misrepresent what Hegel
is saying,”33 an observation that also applies to the Phenomenology, of whi
the Logic is a continuous development.34 Ultimately, Houlgate writes,
“Hegel’s concept of pure being comes mu closer to what Selling has in
mind than Selling allows,”35 a determination whi seems irrefutable from
close readings of these texts, though there are certainly significant
differences between them having to do with the scope and limits of
conceptual thought and the role of potencies, whi may nevertheless be
integrated two centuries later in a more expansive mode of thought to whi
both philosophers made pivotal contributions. In fact, Hegel’s suggestion
that the equation of thought and judgment by the metaphysical tradition
culminating in Kant should be brought into question is remarkably,
surprisingly resonant with Deleuze’s primary philosophical impulse “to do
away with the system of judgment”36 given Deleuze’s equally extensive
critiques of Hegel.
But far from dismissing Selling’s thought, an affirmation of the central
role of personal relationality in philosophy – refusing the prohibition against
“psyologizing” pervasive in the analytic tradition – enables the
recognition that the conceptual persona of Selling provides a creative,
generative aos as complement to the lucid, systematizing order of Hegel, a
complementarity whi embodies and enacts the Dionysian and Apollonian
principles expressed thirty years aer these Berlin Lectures by Nietzse.
And in fact, it is Selling himself, through his elucidation of the divine
personal potencies, who plants the seeds that will come to fruition in
Nietzse, Jung, Deleuze, and especially in Hillman’s conception of
personifying. Selling presciently recognizes that it is the task of reason to
trace the “successive potencies” in order to discern the “inner organism”
whi provides “the key to all being,” an obscure formulation whi will find
a more complete expression in Selling’s explication of the lineal series of
gods dominant in Greek mythology (Uranus, Kronos, Zeus) traced below,
and especially in Deleuze’s integration of this polytheistic mode of thought
with the Leibnizian calculus, whi integrates successive series like the
potencies discussed by Selling.37
e term “potency” is largely derived from Aristotle’s Greek term δύναμη
(“dynamis,” the root of dynamic and dynamism), translated into Latin as
potentia, for whi power and potential are closely related terms, as opposed
to the actual, so that the seed is the potential and the plant is the actual form
of the organism. Selling makes an important distinction between potentia
passiva, merely passive possibility, and potentia activa, an active, universal,
infinite potency of being, whi for Selling is the immediate prius, the
primary, objective being, essence, and cause prior to conceptual thought that
contains the potentiality for infinite expression by passing over into
difference, whi renders it thinkable by reason, and whi is motivated by
the will, the expression of an infinitely open potency in the human freely to
oose the modes of pure potentiality’s expression.38
For Selling, reason is the negative, that whi logically critiques,
divides, differentiates, and eliminates error and contingency, and whi
cannot go beyond the monocentric circular self-confirmation of rational
thought to cognize being in its immediate actuality, but only in its
indeterminate possibility. e negative philosophy has formed the necessary
complement and correction to the ancient and medieval assertions of
precritical dogmatic belief in various potencies, especially revealed divinity,
and this rational negative philosophy has served to differentiate and liberate
conceptual thought from that whi is affirmed in the transitional aempt of
the traditional metaphysics rationally to prove the dogmatic existence of
God. Selling locates the culmination of the negative movement with
Kant’s critical philosophy, whi rendered the older metaphysics obsolete,
though for Selling, this negative philosophy is not the end of philosophy,
but the preparation and precondition demanding the emergence of a novel,
differentiated positive philosophy, whi Selling describes Kant as having
incipiently reintroduced “through the ba door of the practical.”39
However, Selling recognizes that both the negative and positive
philosophies have existed in only partially differentiated forms since at least
the beginnings of Western philosophy in Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle,
who discusses a class of philosophers primarily concerned with the positive
reality of mythology and the Orphic mysteries existing alongside the more
rationally oriented philosophers of antiquity, perhaps especially Socrates
with his dialectical method of critical destruction, whi nevertheless
requires a positive knowledge as the implicit precondition for his learned
ignorance. Selling writes that Socrates’ “spirit lingered precisely on the
boundary of the merely logical and the positive,”40 an insight whi
Nietzse will express in a complementary valence. Both modes of thought,
the negative dialectical philosophy and the positive mythological
philosophy, can be found complexly intermixed in Socrates and Plato, for
instance in the cosmological speculations of the Timaeus, so that Selling
designates these two philosophers as prophetic of a more differentiated
future positive philosophy, while their mutual student Aristotle began to
differentiate a positive philosophy in the domain of a broadly empirical
engagement with the relatively limited actual reality he encountered beyond
mere logic. In turn, this nascent empiricism allowed him to begin to express
the logical negative philosophy within its proper sphere of efficacy, largely
initiating the differentiation of rationalism and empiricism that would pass
through solasticism and the Enlightenment into the Kantian culmination
of the negative philosophy, whi prepared the way for the sublation of the
opposition of rational and empirical in the positive philosophy.
In Selling’s conception, a more completely differentiated positive
philosophy affirms potencies beyond the grasp of reason, emerging not from
a hierarical privileging of positive over negative, but from an integration,
whose form is remarkably resonant with the Hegelian dialectic, of the
nonmodern dogmatic affirmations of potencies whi exceed logical
rationality with the modern critical differentiation of these potencies, a
“third element”41 whi sublates and reconciles the opposition of objective
and subjective being in a new identity, a novel philosophy whi integrates
both the negative and the positive philosophies in their differentiated
articulations. For Selling, as for Hegel, being does not reside in any one of
the three moments of this process, in subject, object, or their integration, but
in the movement through this unmistakably dialectical sublation, a
movement whi occurs through the infinite potency becoming for itself
rather than in itself, and thus unequal and differentiated from itself as a
subject relating to an object. However, whereas Hegel does not see the value
in the concept of personified potencies, Selling conceives potencies,
multiplicitous expressions of a singular infinite potency, as the content
luring thought to leap beyond the merely rational toward actual being in
itself, a conception in whi potency is itself this “leaping toward being,”
producing an “empirical knowledge” beyond what can be merely thought.
ought asymptotically approaes a “correspondence with what is present
in experience,”42 and rationality asymptotically approaes, but never
becomes identical with, empiricism, a mode of relation whi James,
influenced by Selling a half-century later, would nominate a “radical
empiricism,” and whi Deleuze would refine and reframe as a
“transcendental empiricism.” Infinite potency liberates thought from its self-
enclosed monocentric circular necessity into a transcendental movement
toward a reality beyond, and prior to, rational thought.
Selling describes the positive as the existence “above being,”43 providing
a transrational and extralogical foundation and origin for rationally
discernible being, an unknowable grounding prior to consciousness,
ultimately unaainable by the pure reason of negative philosophy, a positive
being whi is radically free and open. e positive philosophy, whi
Selling designates as metaphysical, finds that actuality is prior to thought
and its discernment of potencies, including both monotheistic and
polytheistic divinities. Actuality is a “potency that is no longer potency,” an
inversion whi he designates as “the existing potency,”44 “potentia
universalis,” “universal essence,”
45 “absolute spirit,” or “the One,”46 and

whi, contra Descartes who begins with doubt, “indubitably exists”47 prior
to differentiation. For Selling, being descends from an ultimately
unaainable transcendent actuality toward immanent potentiality, so that
actual existence is that whi is prior to any possible conceptualization,
including the concepts of a God or gods whi can only be encountered
empirically and historically, and this existence beyond reason is only
accessible to an “absolutely ecstatic”48 mode of relation, an experience of
that whi exceeds the possibility of being thought, an unknowable actuality
prior to potency, and to any concept of divinity.
Selling describes the Neoplatonists as reviving this mode of thought
from the positive, though largely undifferentiated, elements in Plato,
especially in relation to mythology, aer the culmination for antiquity of the
negative philosophy in Aristotle, who rejected mythology as a legitimate
means of acquiring knowledge. e Neoplatonists associated these two
philosophers with the major and minor forms of the Eleusinian mysteries,
the renowned initiatory rites of ancient Greek religion, possibly involving
the ingestion of a psyedelic compound like ergot, or even psilocybin,
enacting the mythical ordeal of Persephone’s descent into, and subsequent
emergence from, Hades. e Neoplatonists discerned the major mysteries of
the positive philosophy in Plato, who participated in the initiation, and the
minor mysteries of the negative philosophy in Aristotle, who only wrote
about the rites. In turn, the Christian solastics became the primary
inheritors of the Aristotelian negative philosophy, despite the positive
dogmas of Christianity, in a compromise formation whi Selling
describes as “a rational dogmatism or positive rationalism,”49 a containment
of the positive within the negative orthodoxies of solastic rationalism held
relatively static by the institution of the Chur, whi nevertheless formed
the enclosing womb for the long development and refinement of rationality.
Solasticism was the precondition for the dominance of reason in the
Enlightenment, with its complementary differentiation of a purely
materialist, sensible empiricism, ultimately leading to their integration in a
positive philosophy. However, with hindsight it becomes clear that Selling
did not express the final form of this positive philosophy but rather formed,
along with Hegel in a conflicting and complementary dyad, the precondition
for the further developments of this positive mode of thought, whi would
pass through Nietzse into the twentieth century, and into the increasingly
differentiated integrations of the last half-century since the emergence of
Deleuze and Derrida, primary conceptual personae complexly embodying
the positive and negative philosophies, respectively. Deleuze created a
precondition for their more expansive integration, especially in relation to
the theory of mythological potencies largely derived from Selling, whi
may serve to integrate rationalism and empiricism in a transcendental
empiricism for whi the reasons of thought and the experience of actuality,
both physical and metaphysical, intimately converge and interrelate in a
pervasive internal resonance.50
Like the aracter of an individual, the fundamental aracter of the
world, both the sensible aracter to whi the usual conception of
empiricism is limited, and the supersensible aracter that the more
expansive form of “metaphysical empiricism”51 advocated by Selling
recognizes, can only be discerned a posteriori through its actual expressions
in experience, not rationally derived from a priori premises. ese
metaphysical actualities were elucidated by the stream of thought whi
Selling designates as a mystical or speculative empiricism, whose modes
of discernment are describable as intuition or revelation, running parallel to
dogmatic medieval solastic rationalism, a mode of thought especially
evident in the alemical texts discussed below in relation to Jung, whi
acted as a potent complement to rationalism, demanding the integration of
these two differentiated streams, whi have always coexisted, in a positive
philosophy that exceeds both metaphysical empiricism and logical
rationalism. For Selling, the primary positive contribution of metaphysical
empiricism is that it seeks to understand emergent actualities by tracing
them through a series of actual events, a tracing more fully integrated with
differentiating critical rationality undertaken in the Introduction.
Positive philosophy is not only an a posteriori empirical tracing of this
actual series any more than it is only an a priori rational conception of being
but an emergent integration of these two differentiated modes of relation,
whi discerns a “transcendent being”52 that is also a “pure actuality”53
exceeding both experience and thought, the unknowable ground and truth
of the actual in whi rationalism and empiricism are always already
integrated. e potencies traced through series asymptotically lure
transcendental thought toward an unaainable, always-receding horizon of
knowledge and experience beyond the existing potency, never finally
aained in its complete actuality. However, as with the concepts of God and
the absolute, the transcendent quality of this unthinkable actuality posited
by Selling has tended to be deemphasized over subsequent developments
spanning nearly two centuries, serving as a bridge to the pure immanence of
Deleuze by paradoxically equating the actual and the transcendent,
inverting the traditional metaphysics for whi the transcendent is pure
potentiality whi becomes immanently actual in a compromise formation
that provocatively locates actuality in a transcendent domain forever
inaccessible to thought.
While it is undoubtedly true that actuality is inaccessible to pure
rationality divorced from broadly empirical knowledge, most of the theorists
below will discern that actuality is accessible to the immanent apprehension
whi results from the integration of conceptual thought and bodily
intuition, and thus the further step will be taken, building upon Selling’s
work through subsequent developments in the twentieth century by broadly
constructivist theorists, of leaving behind the conception of a transcendent
domain altogether in favor of a transcendental immanence whi is
ultimately relational. In fact, Selling ambiguously presages this conception
in the final pages of the Grounding despite his insistence on the word
“transcendent.”54 Perhaps more than this strange, and historically necessary,
transitional inversion in the concept of transcendent actuality, Selling’s
greatest contribution is the integration of logical, critical rationality and
intuitive, metaphysical empiricism lured by empirically encountered and
revealed potencies, oen in the form of monotheistic or polytheistic
divinities, through actual series of historical events toward radically free and
open constructive becomings.
e Introduction consists of ten lectures whi take the origin and
meaning of mythology as their primary subject, and Selling spends mu
of these lectures describing, carefully and in great detail, the theories whi
had previously been proposed over several millennia to explain mythology,
though some of these earlier theories are perhaps more plausible to a
nineteenth century sensibility than to a twenty-first century one. In an
approa resonant with the ancient “method of exhaustion” whi formed a
precursor to the integral calculus, he carefully traces all of the previous
theories about mythology in order fully to differentiate them in what he
calls a “dialectic.”55 e majority of these lectures are engaged in an
application of the negative philosophy by sublating the aspects of all
previous theories of mythology whi obstruct the passage of the positive
affirmation of the mythological, metaphysical empiricism that Selling
ultimately offers in a differentiated integration of these previous theories,
leading to what Jason M. Wirth aptly designates as “one of the boldest
claims of the nineteenth century, a claim whose strangeness no doubt still
abides,”56 that the gods of mythology are historical and empirical actualities
whi must be affirmed by a fully realized positive philosophy. ese
lectures thus fulfill the ambition expressed by Selling more than four
decades earlier in a leer to Hegel: “Monotheism of reason and the heart,
polytheism of the imagination and art, that is what we need!”57
Although mythology is involved in the poetic, symbolic, and allegorical
expression of ethical and religious doctrine, and of conceptual thought;
although the gods correspond with natural cycles and forces, their origin
and history corresponding with the origin and history of nature; and
although various figures like Heracles or Asclepius have been elevated to
divine status for their deeds, Selling contends that the gods must
nevertheless have been encountered, through a metaphysical empiricism, as
“actually existing essences”58 prior to these various explanations in order for
mythology to exist in its full scope. e gods cannot be reduced to any of
these explanations, but rather all of these explanations express partial
aspects of a more expansive reality, a mode of thought that Selling
discerns as incipiently reemerging with the Neoplatonists. However, as
Selling anowledges from the outset, although philosophy and
mythology were intimately intertwined in antiquity, in the wake of
rationalism and materialist empiricism in the eighteenth century, these two
domains were starkly opposed, though it is this very disparateness that
demands their reintegration in a novel mode of thought. Selling suggests
that su a positive philosophy of mythology, even more than the
philosophy of nature he propounded in earlier decades to whi the
philosophy of mythology is closely related, may require time before it is
fully integrated into academic discourse. However, perhaps enough time has
now passed, and enough eminent philosophers and psyologists have
complexly affirmed this mode of thought, including Nietzse, Jung,
Deleuze, and Hillman, that we may be nearing a time when justifications in
the face of the rationalist doubts of negative philosophy can be
deemphasized, and we can proceed with philosophically exploring this
araic domain of human experience in novel registers, an integration whi
would profoundly affect many other areas of study.
e primary object of inquiry for these lectures is “the world of the
gods,”59 a domain of reality that has been conceived by the mythological
mode of thought in a “system of the gods”60 streting ba into an obscure
pre-antiquity as a radically “different order of things”61 from the human
world, though the events of these two domains are understood by this mode
as existing in complex relationality. is mythological consciousness
recognizes the divine personalities as relating to one another historically, in
a temporality as profoundly different from the modern conception of time as
that of ildhood is from the temporality of modern adulthood, with whi
it is nevertheless continuous, and only rendered “pre-historical”62 by the la
of wrien documentation, a conception for whi neither of these
temporalities is privileged. In fact, the absence of wrien language is
aracteristic of this relative prehistory, whi itself evidently emerged from
a pretemporal, timeless, cyclical domain prior to conception, a succession of
distinctly enfolded temporalities traced below especially in relation to
Deleuze. e castration and overthrowing of Uranus by his son Kronos is
understood as an actual, though ontologically ambiguous, historical event,
forming a theogony, a “history of the gods”63 traced from their actual,
though ultimately unknowable, prehistoric genesis, the groundless ground
and universal potency of the positive philosophy, a temporal domain for
whi mythology provides one of the very few points of entry.
e theories considered by Selling whi posit monotheism as prior to
polytheism, a view dominant in the West for roughly a millennium from the
beginning of the Middle Ages until the Enlightenment, are perhaps
especially implausible to a twenty-first century sensibility. More plausible is
the suggestion, now generally accepted, that monotheism emerged out of a
prior polytheism, whi in turn emerged out of animism, though the earlier
modes were never completely abandoned, and this trajectory certainly does
not imply that a monotheistic conception of divinity as the one true God is
the final telos of a process of ascension through successive conceptions of
divinity, but only the stage in this process, teleologically lured by a potent
“destiny” toward more individuated modes of consciousness, that has been
dominant since the rise of Christianity in the West. However, although the
earliest human consciousness undoubtedly contained the potential for
monotheism, and even for a specifically Christian monotheism (as well as its
other forms), the current consensus that polytheism, practiced in a wide
diversity of human groups, existed in a multiplicity of gods emerging from a
multifold animism prior to the exclusivist unification of monotheism
beginning in the first or second millennium BCE is evident not only from
the araeological and historical records, but from the very names for God
employed in the Hebrew Bible.
In this ancient text, the angels are called Elohim, whi means “gods” or,
more literally, “ildren of El,” the Phoenician or Canaanite god associated
with Kronos by the Greeks, but it is also the Elohim among whom God
includes himself when he says that “man has become like one of us,” both
God and man as members in a multiplicity possessing a divine knowledge of
good and evil, perhaps indicating a universal potency containing the
multiplicity. However, the assertion of a primordial monotheism does not
undermine Selling’s profound recognition that the primary difference
between the monotheistic and polytheistic conceptions of divinity is that
whereas Hellenic mythology is generated by a “successive polytheism”64 in
whi the highest gods, Uranus, Kronos, and Zeus, succeed one another in
an actual historical series, the multiplicity of gods in the Hebrew Bible are
simultaneous and subservient to the singular, eternal God, Yahweh, whose
names are nevertheless differentiated through the genealogical series leading
from Adam, through Seth, to Enosh, who is the first to call God Yahweh
instead of the more generic Elohim.
In contrast with the monotheistic conception, whi the actual text of the
Bible complicates, the succession of gods in Greek mythology contains the
lived history of a succession of peoples leading to Hellenic culture, in whi
ea of the three primary deities was successively dominant, ea potency
embodying a real historical stage or moment through whi that culture has
passed, and with whi its collective consciousness has tarried. Ea deity
was forced out of its one-sided dominance through an all-consuming crisis
and controversy whi required that the earlier highest gods be dialectically
retained and sublated in the subsequent mythical narratives. at there
subsisted a profound “awe and reverence” for Kronos-Saturn in antiquity
aer the emergence of Zeus-Jupiter as the primary power indicates that the
earlier deity still retained his numinosity from “an unthinkable prior time”
in whi he had still been dominant. Although Selling recognizes that
“mythology has no reality outside of consciousness,”65 it can be reciprocally
maintained that consciousness could not have come into existence without
mythology, as the gods are not merely products of poetic imagination, but
are rather objectively real “God-positing potencies”66 that have successively
possessed the consciousness of humanity. e gods are ideal persons, whom
Nietzse, Jung, Hillman, and even Deleuze will call aretypes, to whom
humans have related in a sustained historical engagement spanning
millennia, metaphysical beings who empirically exist in actuality, though
their ontological status is elusive and paradoxical, and thus they cannot be
reduced either to a mere physicality or to a mere poetic or conceptual
invention. Rather, they complexly interpenetrate the physical and the
metaphysical in the form of potencies, whi can be variously encountered
as real historical humans elevated to divinity, as forces of nature, as modes
of consciousness, and as metaphysical beings, though they are prior to and
exceed these categories.
 For Selling, the emergence of a people coextensive with its language,
mythology, laws, and general mode of consciousness is always mediated by
a profound crisis, oen in the form of a siness of body and soul, just as an
illness can mediate a conversion or liberation in an individual, so that a
novel mode of consciousness cannot emerge without the overcoming of su
a crisis, a transformative initiatory ordeal on a collective scale. is
observation inevitably brings to mind the pervasive crisis of our own time, a
crisis of consciousness profoundly intertwined with climate ange, global
pandemic, political corruption, and social polarization, apparently creating
the necessary precondition for the emergence of a novel mode of relation
presaged by Selling as a positive philosophy. However, in a conception
greatly elaborated by Deleuze, Selling recognizes that the overcoming of
su a transformative crisis is not primarily found in complete solutions to
the problems of whi this crisis consists, but in the formulation of more
profound questions that mark the emergent inception of a novel epo as an
opening to more expansive domains of thought and experience. It is the
collective task of su a novel epo to create new concepts and modes of
thought to answer these deeper questions, a task whi can only be vaguely
presaged or intimated in its nascence. Whereas, according to Selling, the
peoples that emerged coextensively with mythology in pre-antiquity were
generally defined by unified languages and cultures, a primary question that
we now face is how to integrate the inextricably intertwined dissonance of
our multicultural and multilingual nations into an emergent entity that
satisfies the urgent requirement for global solutions to global problems while
avoiding the totalitarian erasure of heterogenous difference, thus
maintaining an open and pluralist society.
We are perhaps undergoing a Deleuzean differential repetition, on a more
expansive scale, of the successive critical emergences of mythological deities
that ea mediated a transformative renascence into a more liberated order
of consciousness, an emergence prophetically prefigured in Abrahamic
monotheism as a future-oriented salvation, the translation of the biblical
word whi literally means “to lead from the narrows and into the
expanse,”67 an expansion of our horizons of conception. However, this
promised future state in whi “all presently dispersed and separated nations
shall again be united”68 may take place not through a totalizing monotheistic
unification, but through a more expansively differentiated integration
aracteristic of polytheistic consciousness, a “philosophical religion”69
subsisting in “relation to the great powers and forces,”70 realized in art as
mu as in philosophy. Perhaps this positive philosophy will emerge as a
pluralist mode of relation in whi even the monotheistic submission to
legislation and negative judgment, as well as the more positive aspects of
monotheism, can find an appropriate place as a non-exclusive moment,
expressing partial truth, in a deeper dialectical process whi affirms a
multiplicitous series of potencies, the progressive unfolding of a univocal
potency whose integral truth is discerned in the movement through the
series of successive systems of philosophy as a differential repetition, in
another domain, of the movement through the mythological series of gods.
Notes
1. Heidegger, Schelling, 2.
2. Heidegger, Schelling, 97; Selling, Freedom, 146n27.
3. Rush, “Critique,” 216.
4. Heidegger, Schelling, 6.
5. Hegel, Logic, 10.
6. James, Writings, 349–50.
7. Selling, Grounding, 130.
8. Houlgate, “Critique,” 120–1.
9. Houlgate, “Critique,” 127.
10. Hegel, Logic, 33.
11. Selling, Mythology, 121.
12. Hegel, History (Brown), 262, 265.
13. Deleuze, Difference, 190–1.
14. Heidegger, Schelling, 471; Althaus, Hegel, 88.
15. Selling, Grounding, 152.
16. Selling, Idealism, xii–xiv, xxxiv.
17. Selling, Grounding, 149.
18. Hegel, Phenomenology, 9.
19. Laughlin, Schelling, 59.
20. Heidegger, Schelling, 13.
21. Selling, Grounding, 150.
22. Selling, Grounding, 145.
23. Selling, Grounding, 150.
24. Selling, Grounding, 176.
25. Selling, Grounding, 145.
26. Selling, Grounding, 151.
27. Selling, Grounding, 146.
28. Selling, Grounding, 150.
29. Selling, Grounding, 150.
30. Selling, Grounding, 153.
31. Houlgate, “Critique,” 115.
32. Houlgate, Opening, 295.
33. Houlgate, “Critique,” 100.
34. Hegel, Logic, 11.
35. Houlgate, “Critique,” 104n16.
36. Deleuze and Parnet, L’Abécédaire, 59.
37. Selling, Grounding, 142, 162.
38. Selling, Grounding, 132–5.
39. Selling, Grounding, 148.
40. Selling, Grounding, 159.
41. Selling, Grounding, 143.
42. Selling, Grounding, 160.
43. Selling, Grounding, 202.
44. Selling, Grounding, 198.
45. Selling, Grounding, 211.
46. Selling, Grounding, 212.
47. Selling, Grounding, 203.
48. Selling, Grounding, 203.
49. Selling, Grounding, 165.
50. See Hippolyte, Logic, 4.
51. Selling, Grounding, 169.
52. Selling, Grounding, 179.
53. Selling, Grounding, 194.
54. Selling, Grounding, 208–9.
55. Selling, Grounding, 11, 153.
56. Selling, Grounding, xii.
57. Selling, Grounding, x.
58. Selling, Grounding, 136.
59. Selling, Grounding, 18.
60. Selling, Grounding, 21.
61. Selling, Grounding, 9.
62. Selling, Grounding, 9.
63. Selling, Grounding, 10.
64. Selling, Grounding, 134.
65. Selling, Grounding, 88–9.
66. Selling, Grounding, 145.
67. Selling, Grounding, 125.
68. Selling, Grounding, 120.
69. Selling, Grounding, 170.
70. Selling, Grounding, 167.
Chapter 6
Something Higher an Any
Reconciliation
Friedri Nietzse’s The Birth of Tragedy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-7

Nietzse was deeply influenced by Spinoza and Selling, and by Hegel,

whom he strongly critiqued, but also admired. As Jean Wahl, who played a
large role in reintroducing Nietzse to France aer World War II, in part
through his student Deleuze, observed, “whi author has, more than
Nietzse, declared that others, so many others, are in error?”1 Nevertheless,
it might not be too mu to say that Nietzse has been the most influential
philosopher in the twentieth century, not only notoriously influencing the
Nazis through their overly simplistic misinterpretations of his work,
encouraged by his sister aer his descent into madness in 1889 and his death
in 1900,2 but also deeply influencing the depth psyologies of Freud and
Jung, the sociology of Max Weber, the existentialisms of Heidegger, Sartre,
and Camus, and the poststructuralisms of Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze.
Nietzse’s intermient misanthropy, misogyny, and flirtation with anti-
Semitism and authoritarianism cannot be denied, and they must be kept in
mind when reading his harsher denouncements of modernity or Socrates or
Christianity.3 We have no oice but to take Nietzse with a large grain of
salt if we hope to avoid succumbing to these pitfalls intertwined with the
positive “revaluation of all values,”4 pitfalls partially connected to his
descent into madness, whi in turn may have been caused by a hereditary
condition. But Nietzse was also extraordinarily profound, and his concepts
cannot be ignored if we hope to understand how to move beyond the
deconstructive “postmodern,” as there is a large strain of thought in his
work, perhaps especially in The Birth of Tragedy, that can be designated as
integrative.
Aer this first work, whi stru a balance between diagnosis and cure,
specifically through the reconciliation of opposites, Nietzse became the
critical diagnostician par excellence, whi is why almost exclusively
diagnostic theorists like Freud and Derrida could be so deeply influenced by
his work. ere are certainly many brilliant positive insights in Nietzse’s
subsequent books, but the overaring tone of his work is primarily critical.
While he brilliantly prophesied and influenced the trajectory of culture and
thought over the century-and-a-half following his writing, it is this first
book whi perhaps provides us with the clearest envisagement of how the
deep historical problems he diagnoses can be overcome in a constructive
moment aer deconstruction, still far in the future in 1872. Certainly, the
concepts of the eternal return, the will to power, and the Overman are also
positive gestures in this direction, and they are more profound in some ways
than this early work, but they are also more obscure and ambiguous.
Nevertheless, those later concepts can be understood as developments,
forged during Nietzse’s darker days, of the mode of thought he expressed
during his happiest and most conventionally successful years. We can
recognize the profundity of the work he wrested from his great suffering
without diminishing the importance of his first work, whi may be
understood as the most hopeful expression of the mode that Nietzse would
articulate in his later works, not fundamentally different – more naïve, but
also more constructive, the lightest color in Nietzse’s palee.5
e revaluation of all values he undertook in his later books is not an
activity that most of us would be willing, or even able, fully to undertake in
our lived experience, “to live what is unlivable, or to think what is
unthinkable,” as Stengers writes, whi would in some cases entail violations
of the most basic progressive principles of equality and compassion, but a
primary contribution of these later works is “to refer to the unlivable and
the unthinkable, to criticize or deconstruct that in whi others still
‘believe.’ ”6 We may be willing to part with the affects of ressentiment and
guilt, but we may also want to preserve the positive progressive ideals of
compassion, tolerance, and forgiveness, oen derived from Christianity, as
ethical principles rather than moral laws.7 In fact, Nietzse was by all
accounts generally polite and mild-mannered in his personal relations, so
rather than take seriously Nietzse’s extreme rhetoric, sometimes bordering
on reactionary, that we can cast aside morality, as the Nazis did, we should
rather understand Nietzse as liberating us from the unquestioning
obedience to moral laws and their affective bondage. As Nietzse exhorts
us: “Let us remain faithful to Wagner in what is true and original in him –
and especially, as his disciples, by remaining faithful to ourselves in what is
true and original in us.”8 is exhortation can be extended to Nietzse
himself, and to any of the theorists discussed in these pages, so that we can
affirm both the truth and originality we find in others and the truth and
originality we find in ourselves, though these truths may appear
incommensurable with what is less true and original in the other, perhaps
primarily constituted in what they deny.
Nietzse presaged the descent of the world into madness, culminating in
the death and rebirth of the mid-twentieth century, from the abyssal horrors
of the World Wars to the ecstatic heights of the counterculture and the
ultimate complexities of poststructuralism in the sixties and seventies. But
his initiatory text, before he was baered by disappointment, seems most
consistently to suggest a way forward, though some of the concepts he
introduced later were indispensable additions to this initial vision, not in its
specifics in relation to Nietzse’s time, whi rely far too heavily on
Sopenhauer and Wagner – Nietzse later anowledging that one could
simply replace Wagner’s name with Zarathustra, or even with Nietzse
himself 9 – but in its impulse toward the integration of the Apollonian and
the Dionysian, of ordered, moderate consciousness and the aotic,
transformative unconscious, two of a multiplicity of “the gods whi are in
us,” as he would write a decade later.
10
 Nietzse is perhaps the most autobiographical of all philosophers, so his
fascinating and tragic biography must be taken into account when
discussing his work. He was in ronic pain, whi he understood as deeply
affecting, and even impelling his philosophy.11 Far from nullifying his ideas
– and equally far from glorifying his pain – this recognition demonstrates
how different kinds of truths, different valid narrative constructions of
reality, are at least partially motivated by different bodily feelings. Nietzse
is more affectively negative than most of the other thinkers discussed in
these pages, perhaps because he experienced more physical pain, but his
great triumph is to have transmuted these affects into epoally creative and
inspired concepts. Among many more positive concepts, Nietzse teaes
us that we cannot hope to integrate the disparate multiplicity of affective
and conceptual experience if we do not anowledge, and even tarry with,
the negative, the apparently incommensurable and irreconcilable. Hegel
understood this, but Nietzse explicitly rejected the negative, while
implicitly giving it voice, because he lived it in his body, but sought to
transmute this negativity into pure affirmation, an extraordinarily admirable
goal that he aieved with only partial success. As he wrote just two months
before his final break with sanity: “e psyological problem about the type
of Zarathustra is how one who to an unprecedented degree says ‘no,’ does
‘no’ to everything people previously said ‘yes’ to, can nevertheless be the
opposite of a no-saying spirit.”12 is problematic paradox also applies to
Nietzse himself, and it is not possible to aieve a differentiated theory of
integration without taking Nietzse’s paradoxical transgressivity into
account, without dwelling deeply with him in his pain as well as in his
sublime genius.
It may be surmised that what Nietzse found objectionable in Hegel is
that he made the negative a formula, despite Hegel’s protestations,
something to be reconciled in a return to unity rather than an irreducible
bodily experience, perhaps in part because Hegel did not dwell with
constant pain. Although we can recognize Hegel as immensely profound, he
was perhaps prevented from aieving the particular kind of depth that
Nietzse explored by his la of persistent, extraordinary physical affliction.
He simply did not suffer enough to aain those particular insights, though
he aained his own more consistently positive affectively impelled insights,
despite his emphasis of the negative. e specific circumstances of
philosophers’ lives, as well as their intrinsic temperaments, deeply condition
the particular contours of their work, whi in turn condition the way their
ideas are received, forming both the limitations and the essential textures of
their historical development in actuality, rather than as abstract,
disembodied conceptual systems. Philosophers are not less because of the
particular contingencies of their lives, but more. As Spinoza and James
especially recognize, affect is destiny, and the contingencies of birth and
circumstance that determine the particular affective complexes of ea
individual are the constraining and impelling forces that forge philosophers
in all their glorious humanity, allowing them to create their conceptual
personae as works of art expressing different kinds of truth.
Nietzse understood that illness and health, pain or its la, inevitably
inform the work of a philosopher, so that while we can be grateful to him
for having endured immense pain for the two decades of his great
productivity, whi impelled him to explore the profoundest depths and
darknesses of human experience, and thereby render these realms legitimate
areas of inquiry for depth psyology and continental philosophy in the
twentieth century, we can also find great value for our current era in his first
book. Wrien in the wake of the happiest time in Nietzse’s life, despite the
terrible horrors he had witnessed and the grievous wounds he had suffered
as an ambulance driver in the Franco-Prussian war, he was carried through
this book’s composition by the wave of good fortune that began with him
becoming a professor of philology at the University of Basel at the extremely
young age of twenty-four, and then becoming very close with Riard and
Cosima Wagner, when Wagner was one of the most revered composers of
his generation. A high-spirited optimism permeates this book, though
inevitably tempered by Nietzse’s incipient suffering, so that it is not
merely a work of naïve youthful folly, as it is sometimes judged, but
Nietzse’s most sustained positive expression of a “philosophy of the
future,”13 along with mu of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and parts of other
works, not yet filled with the ressentiment that would ironically come to
permeate mu of his later work, even, and perhaps especially, in the
undeniably brilliant denouncement of ressentiment.
For one instance of many, Nietzse’s first piece of published writing aer
The Birth of Tragedy was the “untimely meditation” on David Strauss,
whom Nietzse viciously, gleefully denounces as a conventionally
Christian-humanist philistine.14 Although there is surely mu truth in
Nietzse’s critique, one might also notice that Strauss’ book, published the
same year as Nietzse’s first book, sold many copies and received wide
acclaim, while Nietzse’s was, at first, largely rejected and neglected. It
only adds to the awareness of Nietzse’s apparent jealousy, expressed in a
joyously scornful fugue of hate-reading, that he denounces the philistines
exemplified by Strauss’ readers for having resisted, and not having
recognized, previous great German writers in their own time, a grievance
whi transparently displays Nietzse’s resentment over his own genius not
having been immediately recognized upon the publication of his first book.
Perhaps Nietzse even envied Strauss’ moderate courage in critiquing a
literalist Christian faith in the miraculous, while still upholding Christian
morality, as Nietzse later expressed regret for not having extended his
critique of Socrates in his first book to Christianity, whi would become a
primary object of his wrath for the rest of his career.15 But far from
discounting Nietzse, this transparent irony is a large element in his
paradoxical arm, through whi he expressed some of the darkest and
most dangerous thoughts in a way that allows the discerning reader to
recognize his woundedness and insecurity, and thus to love him as an
endearingly pathetic and brilliant figure despite his many harsh and
transgressive pronouncements.
In all honesty, we generally become experts in subjects that are urgently,
intimately important to us, a situation that Nietzse himself recognizes,
writing: “Does not everything that we take to be important betray
us?”16Nietzse’s constant suffering and his relative la of worldly success
impelled him to effect a reversal in whi the suffering philosopher-artist is
superior to the physically healthy, bourgeois member of society. While this
great driving force of his work is ironic given his denouncement of the
Christian notion that “the meek shall inherit the earth,”17 as he was the
epitome of a physically meek person incapable of a normative life, despite
his vigorous hiking sedule, this fundamental, inescapable contradiction in
his thought allowed him to illuminate the complexities of ressentiment with
a penetrating insight that would have been impossible had he not
experienced this affect so completely himself. As James observes in relation
to Nietzse’s denouncement of Christian saints: “Poor Nietzse’s antipathy
is itself sily enough, but we all know what he means.”18 Nietzse is most
closely associated with the negative critical philosophy that is the
phenomenological correlate of suffering, but his first book is where he
perhaps most fully expresses a way beyond the suffering aracteristic of the
death of the modern, whi had to be gone through, with the current
political regressions in the United States and Europe perhaps marking one of
the last gasps of modernity and patriary, a torturous contraction in an
epoal renascence. Nietzse’s vision of the reconciliation of the
Apollonian and Dionysian opposites in the imminent work of Wagner was
doomed to failure, as the whole descent, whi he so strikingly presaged,
into the horrors of the World Wars had to be gone through before the
reascent could begin with the counterculture. is rebirth from the egoic
death of Western culture, whi found one culmination in 1945, was a new
Hellenic renaissance inspired to a large degree by Nietzse himself, one in a
series of transformative deaths and rebirths in whi we are evidently still
embroiled, like the shamanic initiate who dies and is reborn multiple times
over the course of the initiatory ordeal.19
If Deleuze can claim in Nietzsche and Philosophy that “the final truth of
the dialectic”20 is found in Hegel’s early, more explicitly Christian writings,
why then can we not recognize the truth of Nietzse, or at least an essential
part of that truth, in his first book? Miael Inwood has posed a similar
question about Heidegger, extrapolating from Heidegger’s own concepts: “A
genuine beginning, he said, is not simple or primitive. It leaps over what is
to come. Might this be true of his own early work?”21 I would suggest that
Nietzse’s first book in some ways leaps over what was to come, containing
the purest expression of the creative impulse that animated all of his
thought, before rejection, disappointment, illness, and isolation deepened
him, but also turned him against the world, against himself, and possibly
contributed to his descent into madness.22 Just as Nietzse suggests that we
in the modern era have been living the ages of Ancient Greece bawards,
perhaps in the century-and-a-half since this startling insight was expressed,
we have been living the development of Nietzse’s thought bawards,
following Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of the unconscious, ba to
the unprimitive primal imaginary that marked Nietzse’s origin as a
philosopher.23
Nietzse writes in Ecce Homo that The Birth of Tragedy “smells
offensively Hegelian,”24 but this rejection of his dialectical origins cannot be
separated from the tragic trajectory Nietzse traced in his own life. As with
many writers, he was a bit embarrassed by his early work, though he also
still found value in it at the very end of his career, writing that this book is
“uerly remarkable” and “anticipatory,” that it was his “first revaluation of
all values,” and it is illuminating to realize that this is the only book he
wrote before being ostracized from the academy.25 In fact, it is the
overwhelmingly negative reception of this book by the philological
community that ruined his academic reputation and largely rendered him an
outsider, so that before the book was published, hundreds of students were
aending his public lectures, while aer the book’s publication, his courses
were being canceled due to la of enrollment. is work can thus be
considered the only relatively mature expression of Nietzse’s thought
before he was baered by critical aas and embiered by the suffering of
academic rejection, accompanied by the degeneration of his physical health,
whi nevertheless allowed him to resign his professorship with a yearly
pension to focus on writing.
Although it is true, as Deleuze suggests, that Nietzse in The Birth of
Tragedy reifies the opposition of the Dionysian groundless abyss and
Apollonian individuation, this oppositional relation is implicitly situated
within a more complex multiplicity of agential potencies. In this book,
Nietzse tends to portray these opposed aretypes, as he calls them
(Urbilder), in a totalizing sema still constrained by the tradition of
dualistic western metaphysics ultimately embodied in the Hegelian dialectic,
whi nevertheless provides an opening to its own self-overcoming.
However, Nietzse’s later conception, a primary precursor to Deleuze’s
expression of a mythical dialectic, does not require the complete
abandonment of opposition as an efficacious conceptual construction.
Rather, it allows binarity’s resituation as one axis in a more expansive
topological manifold of singular potencies in constantly shiing complexes
of relationality conceivable in geometrical terms, not only as opposed, but
also as conjunctive, confluent, perpendicular, parallel, intertwining in
tortuous curves, or even missing one another altogether, trajectories sailing
on entirely disjointed and eccentric planes of immanence. For Deleuze, the
later Nietzse discovered “a new way of exploring the depth, of bringing a
distinct eye to bear upon it, of discerning in it a thousand voices, of making
all of these voices speak,”26 a novel mode embodied in Hillman’s Jungian
aretypal psyology as mu as in Deleuze’s “method of dramatization”27
and Deleuzoguaarian sizoanalysis.
It is not until aer his first work that Nietzse began really to think of
himself as untimely, as out of step with his age. He enacted the descent into
the Dionysian domain of the irrational unconscious, whi he deeply affirms
in his work, though the negative inflection of this mythological figure
became a dominant fact in the World Wars and the rise of the Nazis in their
orgies of mass destruction and the will to power expressed in its most facile
and simplistic form as mere dominance.28 And it is not surprising that the
Nazis found some justification for their atrocities in Nietzse, though this
was never his intention, and they misread him badly, for as one Nazi
intellectual wryly observed, “apart from the fact that Nietzse was not a
socialist, not a nationalist and opposed to racial thinking, he could have
been a leading National Socialist thinker.”29 Nietzse envisioned an artistic
and cultural awakening, not a military or political one.
Although his early depiction of the Dionysian is perhaps somewhat one-
sided and overly laudatory, Nietzse expresses a profound conception of
what has been lost in the privileging of theoretical order that he associates
with the Apollonian, and eventually with Socrates, and whi found its
culmination in modern science. He offers a powerful presentiment of how
the Socratic-Apollonian order can be integrated with the Dionysian in a
novel mode of relation, though it seems to have required the mediation of
the twentieth century for this prescience to begin to become a viable
actuality, the descent whi necessarily preceded any real hope of ascent.
Nietzse’s thought is unmistakably dialectical in this text, and there is no
denying that Hegel remained the dominant philosophical figure of
Nietzse’s era, Deleuze and Guaari going so far as to nominate the period
encompassing Nietzse’s life as “his Hegelian epo.”30 But by
incorporating these two gods into an oppositional dialectical conception,
Nietzse began to create the precondition for a more expansively pluralist
mythical dialectic beyond binarity, though he came to understand that a
descent into the unconscious had to be gone through before this theory of
eternal return could be fully expressed, that the sun had to go down in order
to rise again in a new dawn, and the rising could not be rushed, but
proceeded inexorably at its own steady pace.31 is work conveys
Nietzse’s youthful desire to leap ahead past the tragic descent by affirming
tragedy, to master suffering by affirming it, a suffering whi he had already
experienced in the war, and perhaps hoped quily to move beyond, though
he came to understand that suffering cannot ultimately be mastered, that it
demands submission, and that his role was to preside over the descent, to
embody, express, and even transmute it in all of its sustained complexity and
ambiguity.
Nietzse primarily portrays the development from the ancient Dionysian
orus to the later Platonic-Socratic philosophy as a loss, but it is a
necessary loss, a differentiating separation that could only begin to be
overcome in Nietzse’s time aer the Enlightenment and Idealism, though
he later came to understand that his timeline was far too optimistic. A
century later, Derrida is almost completely immersed in this sense of loss
and closure, but Nietzse, like Jung and Deleuze aer him, is ambivalent,
feeling acutely the loss of nonrational modes of relation, but also envisaging
a mode beyond pure reason, to whi the dialectic creates an opening,
though still enclosed by the Apollonian-Socratic in its privileging of rational
intelligibility over other modes aracteristic of the Dionysian. While
Nietzse’s later works would offer deeper articulations of some of the
concepts expressed here, as well as novel, indispensable concepts, and
although the critique oen dominant in those later works was necessary for
the final writing of deconstruction, The Birth of Tragedy provides a glimpse
of what might come aer that deconstruction. In order completely to
embody the critical mode and become a primary prophet of modernity’s
demise, Nietzse had to oose to leave behind the more affectively positive
and hopeful mode of this work, and we can be grateful for his martyrdom, a
martyrdom so complete that he would later deny the validity of
philosophical martyrdom itself.32 But for the purpose of moving beyond the
critical mode, Nietzse’s primal, youthful expression provides a positive
impulsion, enigmatically sustained in the primarily negative trajectory of his
later work, whi may serve to carry later positive concepts, extracted like
precious jewels from their profoundly tortured embedding, into novel
affective and conceptual domains.
As Nietzse understood, he was able to enact the descent into the
Dionysian aos not in spite of his illness, but in part because of it. Similarly,
he was able vividly to envision the ascent aer a descent in his first book
because this was the happiest time of his life, the time when he himself was
in the ascent in both his career as a professor and in his personal life with
the Wagners. Although his expression of the ascent would become deeper, it
would also become profoundly ambiguous, as Zarathustra is only “a shadow
of that whi must come,” the negative space defined by the absence of an
anticipated positive illumination, and thus “that will whi is will to power
must will something higher than any reconciliation – but how shall this
happen?”33 Nietzse never provides a straightforward answer to this
question, and neither Zarathustra nor Nietzse can tell us what exactly the
Overman and the eternal return are except in evocative parables, though
these evocations enabled Deleuze’s more fully elaborated theory of the
eternal return.34 Nietzse is reaing for something he can feel but not
quite grasp, something like reconciliation but beyond it, a higher register of
reconciliation, a will to potencies whi can only be alluded to, eternally
circled in upon, but never quite aained, at least in his direct expression,
through the figures of Zarathustra, Dionysus, Ariadne, and Overman. He
recognizes that before he can rea his highest ascent, his fate is that he
must “descend deeper into suffering than I ever climbed before,” as “from the
deepest the highest must come into its height,”35 and although he was never
able to accomplish this ascent that he foresaw, we may carry forward the
ascent initiated in the twentieth century in large part because Nietzse
descended so deeply.
In his “Aempt at Self-Criticism” of The Birth of Tragedy, wrien
fourteen years aer the book’s publication, Nietzse anowledges that he
had been overly optimistic about the possibility of an imminent
reconciliation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian embodied in the music
of Wagner. is reconciliation not having occurred, and his relationship
with Wagner having progressively deteriorated, we find Nietzse darker,
more pessimistic, perhaps because, within the course of his individual life,
he could sense Germany maring inexorably toward the horrors of the
World Wars, whi are aer all the extreme expression of the shadow of the
Dionysian irrational, the lowest form of the will to power, even as the
twentieth century also witnessed a dramatic awakening of the more positive
aspects of the Dionysian impulse, not only in philosophy, but in art,
literature, cinema, and perhaps most significant for the current context, in
music. As he writes with astonishing prescience in Ecce Homo: “Some day
my name will be linked to the memory of something monstrous, of a crisis
as yet unprecedented on earth, the most profound collision of consciences,”36
the collision of fascist destruction on one hand and the creative trajectory of
twentieth century thought and art on the other. He did not create this titanic
collision, but only foresaw its inevitability.37 Within the decades of his life,
Nietzse’s growing darkness was perhaps necessary, mirroring the
encroaing darkness of the world. But nearly a century-and-a-half aer its
publication, the hopefulness of his first book may finally be timely, as we
may now be witnessing, and collectively creating, the incipient emergence
of a novel mode of thought aer deconstruction that integrates the
Apollonian-Socratic rationality privileged in modernity with older mythical
modes that correspond with the figure of Dionysus, situating both Apollo
and Dionysus in a more expansive multiplicity of potencies. Although
Nietzse’s life and thought enacted a tragic descent into the underworld as
mu as any other modern figure, we can discern in his first book, this
“impossible book,”38 as he called it, the opening to a more profoundly
differentiated positive integration.
Nietzse’s revaluation of all values does not primarily offer a way
beyond this diagnosis and descent, but a clearing of the stage, with only
subtle clues and intimations that were taken up by the Nazis (however
mistakenly) as well as depth psyology and continental philosophy. e
Hegelian dialectic, partially conceivable as a rational expression of the
ancient dynamics of death and rebirth, is a pivotal step toward the creation
of a future mode of ascent and rebirth aer the death of the modern, but the
dialectic cannot accomplish this task alone. It requires its metadialectical
complement in the trajectory that has led from Nietzse to
poststructuralism and yet further, a differentiating integration beyond
opposition and reconciliation. Only in this way can a dialectical conception
become subtle enough to allow for the emergence of the Overman through
the eternal return, though it is Nietzse’s first book whi begins to express
a novel inflection of the dialectic for whi his later work provides a
deepening complement, a critique that may ultimately allow that initial
dialectical impulse to emerge triumphant, transformed through its
integration with differentiating potencies. Nietzse’s work thus contains
both the dialectic and the seeds of its overcoming in the twentieth century,
especially with Deleuze, who would carry the critique of the dialectic to its
final self-immolation, and thus provide a way for philosophy to overcome
the Hegelian oppositional dialectic, whi had offered a profoundly
liberating and novel mode of thought in the early decades of its reception,
but whi had inevitably come to be felt as a constraining orthodoxy due to
its nearly hegemonic dominance in nineteenth-century philosophy.
e mythological and historical figures around whom Nietzse builds his
conception in his first book do not always accurately depict the way these
figures were conceived by the Greeks themselves, whi is one of the
primary critiques that this text received from philologists. But Nietzse is
aer a more symbolic, psyological truth, and he employs these figures to
begin to express his theory of powers. Nietzse asserts that for a poetic,
artistic mode of thought, whi he is employing in his evocation of the
development of ancient Greek dramatic art, metaphor plays the role that
concepts play for a more rationalist mode. ese figures are not merely
allegorical aracters employed to represent particular abstract qualities, but
living, imaginal persons, aretypes as Nietzse describes them, a term
whi Jung, Hillman, and others would later take up in great depth.39 e
deities Nietzse evokes, Apollo and Dionysus, rule their respective domains
in a more-than-metaphorical way, and he identifies the height of Greek art,
located with Aic tragedy in the fih century BCE, as the synthesis of these
two potencies, reflecting the forces at work in biological evolution as
mediated through the oen conflictual relation, and occasional
reconciliation, of male and female in sexual reproduction.
Nietzse describes Apollo as exemplified by the placid, ordered visual art
of sculpture, correlated with dream and illusion, with prophecy and fantasy,
with the higher world of Mount Olympus, with truth and perfection,
moderation and self-knowledge, and with the intelligible daylight
consciousness of the differentiated self, embodied in the sublime art of
Homer. By contrast, Dionysus is exemplified in the discordant, instinctive,
affective art of music, correlated with intoxication and revelry, with sexual
urges and the profusion of spring, with the descent into the underworld of
the unconscious, with excess and hubris, and with the nighime dissolution
of the ego in communion with nature and the collective. e two aretypes
eternally clash as an opposition between countervalent impulses, a tension
whi impels these dynamisms to produce ever-higher and more potent
offspring, culminating in rare moments of miraculous metaphysical
reconciliation exemplified in the era of Aic tragedy, beginning in 499 BCE
with the first performance of a dramatic work by Aesylus.
e correlation of dreams with daylight consciousness may seem jarring,
even paradoxical, as one would tend to think of dreams as correlated with
unconscious nighime slumber, but the Apollonian is not yet the rational,
theoretical mode that Nietzse will associate in later apters with Socrates,
and Nietzse may have conflated the figure of Apollo with other divine
potencies, requiring further differentiations in his wake. For Nietzse, the
Apollonian is the illusion of the Vedic goddess Maya, recalling the Platonic
image of the phenomena of existence as shadows on the wall of the cave, the
world as a mere eo of transcendent, eternal Forms whi it has been the
traditional task of philosophers to discern, to see beyond the immanent
world to this transcendent domain behind conscious experience. e
Apollonian is a relatively undifferentiated precursor to the theoretical
consciousness of Socrates, who will eventually take the place of Apollo in
Nietzse’s narrative, shiing the opposition from the two gods in tragic art
leading up to the fih century, to that between the god Dionysus and the
man Socrates, who lived during the height of tragedy, but who was opposed
to this dramatic art in its earlier, higher forms.
Nietzse is clearly on the side of Dionysus, who would remain a primary
figure in his later work, to the point that Nietzse signed some of his last
leers before his break with sanity as Dionysus, while the figure of Apollo
quily fades into the baground partway through The Birth of Tragedy.
But in this work, we see the Dionysian rending the Apollonian veil of
illusion to reveal an occulted originary unity behind the many, to whi the
collective gains access through ecstatic music and dance, in whi
individuals forget themselves and the conventional modes of relation, the
mere walking of daily life, and instead learn to “fly dancing into the
heavens.”40 e opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian provides
explanatory efficacy at some discursive levels, but it seems to break down
into incoherence if one tries, as Nietzse initially does, to generalize it too
far, whi seems to be why he shis the opposition with the Dionysian from
Apollo to Socrates. However, within the specific domain of the relation
between these two divinities, Nietzse’s evocation is profound, though
there are other domains, other orthogonal, diagonal, or eccentric relations
with other forces that complicate this too-neat oppositional distinction.
Nevertheless, this binary issuing into reconciliation expresses something
essential not only to the era of Greek tragedy, but to the historical epo
more generally, a persistent problematic opposition whi can also manifest
in more confluent ways, among other oppositions, and still other
geometrical relations that exceed the figure of binarity, one relational axis
among a multiplicity, one degree of freedom and constraint within a more
multifarious and expansive topological manifold.
Aer describing the two potencies in this evocative way, whi contains
elements of both illumination and obfuscation, Nietzse offers a complex
narrative that traces an unmistakably dialectical movement, from the
ancient cult of Dionysus to its negation and complement in the rise of the
dominance of Apollo in the Doric art of the eighth through the middle of the
fih century BCE. is period’s end is generally located around the decades
of Socrates’ birth in 470 BCE, serving temporarily to suppress the ecstatic
and unitive, but also grotesque and bestial, impulses of the Dionysian,
embodied in the earlier forms of Greek art and religion. However, this
temporary reactionary oppression of the Dionysian by the Apollonian was
disrupted by a spontaneous return of the repressed, whi impelled “a timely
reconciliation”41 – a striking phrase given Nietzse’s subsequent embrace of
the untimely – whi he describes as the central period in ancient Greek
religious history, a transformative emergence of something fundamentally
novel from this oppositional relation, precisely the type of transformative
historical moment whi Nietzse foresaw, but never experienced in his
lifetime.
Before this ancient reconciliation, even Greek music was Apollonian,
aracterized by regular and placid rhythms, recalling the “simple rhythm”42
of the Hegelian dialectic, whi the reemergence of the Dionysian, in the
form of the dithyramb, transformed through the production of potent affect,
both the glorious heights and the abyssal depths of experience flaened and
suppressed in the ordered cultural era dominated by the Apollonian, a
critique eoed by the mid-twentieth century counterculture’s dim view of
the relatively conservative postwar order in the West. is Dionysian
impulse is the creative and destructive will of nature, whi rends the
comforting Apollonian illusion, penetrating through to the primal source
behind the veil of Maya, a potency searing for symbolic expression to
carry ancient Greek culture beyond the bounds of what it had thus far
aieved, a dynamism embodied in liberating ecstatic dance suppressing the
individual ego, allowing the transformative power of the Dionysian to
manifest through the collective, whi could easily be a contemporary
description of the music and counterculture of the mid-twentieth century.
Nietzse finds himself powerfully drawn, apparently by something that
exceeds his conscious volition, to assert that the Dionysian drive toward
transformation through the depths of suffering requires the transcendent
Apollonian dream-order to be redeemed from mere destruction, for its
ascent from the underworld, where the hero may be transformed by the
Apollonian mirroring of the Dionysian from whi the phenomenal world
emerges. And, in the opposite trajectory, just as the Apollonian is necessary
to redeem the Dionysian, so was the Dionysian necessary to jolt the ancient
Greeks out of their restraining, inhibiting moderation to confront the raging
torrents of titanic will and desire, of suffering and ecstasy, behind the
civilized illusion they had erected against the “barbarian”43 invasion of the
Dionysian. is invasion served as the destructive negative of the
Apollonian, paradoxically impelling the Apollonian to its redemptive
ascendance, whi it would never generate the force to aieve alone,
without the penetrating creative aos of the Dionysian, a death of the ego
whi allows a more profound truth to be reborn through a by-turns
torturous and ecstatic labor. e Dionysian is the force of creative
destruction that inexorably arises to transform the periods when the
Apollonian is dominant, whi have seled into a static, rigid orthodoxy.
But the moments when Dionysus is dominant cannot last for long, as their
destructive excess becomes too mu for a culture to bear, so that a new
order is born out of the ashes of the old, and the peak of this order occurs at
the moment of reconciliation between the two aretypes, whi prepares
the way for a novel confrontation, consummation, and emergence. Nietzse
describes this historical process enacted in Greek culture, whi can be
extrapolated to other cultures and other times – including Nietzse’s and
our own – as being teleologically lured toward the highest moment of
synthesis exemplified in the Dionysian dithyramb, the song form
aracteristic of Aic tragedy, the ild who emerges from the sustained
discord issuing into a union of the two gods.
Having primarily lionized the Dionysian, Nietzse also anowledges
that the descent into the unconscious can, as with Hamlet’s terrible
understanding, inhibit action in the world, suppressing the will to act in the
egoic death that can only issue into rebirth in concert with the Apollonian,
whose illusions constrain and give form to the undifferentiated aos
experienced in the agonies and ecstasies of the Dionysian state, whi
renders the concerns of the daylight world absurd and irrelevant. Dionysus
allows one to see past these conventional orthodoxies, these constructed
cultural forms of Apollo, whi in turn serve to differentiate the ego from
the world so that one can find a reason to act as an individuated self rather
than merely wating the world pass by without fear or desire. Although the
Dionysian is the will itself, this will can only find a domain of effectuation
in relation with the Apollonian veil of the phenomenal world, the mind
freely oosing its form of expression, though Nietzse would not read
Spinoza for another nine years when he would joyfully discern a resonance
with what he had already intimated. e Apollonian without the Dionysian
becomes rigid and static, but the Dionysian without the Apollonian is
meaningless and undifferentiated.
e Dionysian orus is the artistic expression of the tragic and ecstatic
depths of reality, mediated through the sublime Apollonian artifice, whi
provides the structure of dramatic art in order to annel the Dionysian
force of creative destruction into a cultural form that allows the collective to
participate in the Dionysian self-overcoming, dissolving the binary of
audience and orus while maintaining the constraints necessary for
civilized existence, a balance of nature and culture whi marries the
deepest things with the highest things to generate an emergent mode of
relation. e Apollonian artistic form allowed the Dionysian spirit in the
audience to witness itself in the mirror of the orus, and thus to become
conscious of itself, and finally to pass through that mirror to become one
with its other in the total event of the tragic drama, discontinuously
producing a more expansive consciousness, a mythical evocation of the
dialectic whi describes the process of an entity becoming other than itself
in order to become conscious of itself, out of whi emerges a reconciliation
of opposites on two perpendicular axes, of both the audience and the orus,
and of the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
It is almost precisely halfway through the book that Nietzse shis the
opposition with Dionysus from Apollo to Socrates, the mask of a radically
novel divine force, the embodiment of “theoretical man.”44 Ever since the
authorities of Athens had condemned Socrates, making him the founding
martyr of a new kind of religion, one that transcended religion as it is
generally understood called philosophy, the image of Socrates in Western
culture has been almost entirely positive. Nietzse’s philosophical
denunciation of Socrates is profoundly transgressive, inverting the general
aracter of the last two millennia of philosophy, whi has overwhelmingly
conceived of Socrates as initiating a higher stage of culture than the mystery
cults of ancient Greek religion. Nietzse portrays the emergence of
theoretical rationality in the figure of Socrates as a loss of primal unity and
enantment, a critique that has been taken up in numerous forms in the
twentieth century, and whi has found its way in varying degrees into the
works discussed in all of the apters below, whi generally express a more
balanced view of modernity than either advocating an exclusivist privileging
of rationality or the countervalent denouncement complexly embodied in
Nietzse, conceiving modernity as constituting both a loss and a gain, a fall
and an ascent.
For Nietzse, Socrates represents the degeneration of Greek tragedy, as
Socrates explicitly preferred the more rationally intelligible aesthetic
employed by Euripides to the more mysterious and ecstatic Dionysian mode
of Aesylus. e Apollonian divorced almost entirely from the Dionysian
loses its vitality and grandeur, becoming all too human in its more
theoretical and naturalist mode, in whi the aracters on the stage merely
reflect the surface, egoic conventionality of the audience ba to itself,
amplifying this daylight consciousness in the recursive loop of a debased
form of art and life. Euripides employs the Apollonian illusion in service to
the belief, whi would become dominant in modernity, that rationality,
especially in the discernment of causality, can single-handedly render the
world intelligible. Nietzse, who would come to be recognized as the
preeminent critical voice of his era, critiques Euripidean tragedy for its
rationalist criticality and facile intelligibility, whi for him flaen the
affective and artistic heights and depths that rendered Aic tragedy so
elevated, profound, and transformative. Whereas one might usually think of
increased consciousness as progress, Nietzse primarily expresses the loss
of the primal unity of the earlier cultural form, though he employs the very
verbal and conceptual tools of philosophy to critique the cultural moment
exemplified by Euripides and Socrates in the fih century BCE that is a
foundational moment of these critical instruments. is is the self-enclosed
quality that would come to aracterize Derridean deconstruction in an
even more extreme way, employing logocentric rationality to think beyond
the rational, an undertaking whi Derrida generally deems impossible, but
for whi Nietzse variously discerns an opening, first in the reconciliation
of opposites in The Birth of Tragedy, and then in the mode that goes beyond
reconciliation, whi he can only express in the obscurely profound figures
of the eternal return, the will to power, and the Overman.
Later, Nietzse would push the potency opposed to the Dionysian even
further than the movement from the Apollonian to the Socratic, rendering
Christ as Dionysus’ opposite, but also identifying himself, in his late leers,
not only as Dionysus, but also as e Crucified, suggesting a complex
integration whi it would not be Nietzse’s destiny to complete, but only
to evoke, to create the conditions for the overcoming of this multivalent
opposition of Apollo-Socrates-Christ with Dionysus in the work of later
theorists. Whereas before Socrates, the instinctual was the primary creative
and affirmative force, Socrates inverts this relation to render critical
consciousness as the creative dynamism, a mode that was almost exclusively
privileged in Nietzse’s time, so that even his critique of this critical
consciousness employs that very mode for its self-immolation. Whereas
Aic tragedy is the peak artistic expression of the mystical primal unity of
being, Socrates is the agent of rationality against mysticism, whi has oen
been understood as progress in the ascent of science in modernity, but the
loss of whi has been felt acutely at least since the Romantic reaction to the
Enlightenment. Nietzse may be understood as embodying this
countervalent tendency carried to an extreme, whi would enable the
reaction against rationality of the mid-twentieth century counterculture, but
also of the mind devouring itself in the figure of Derrida, as well as the
emergence of a novel mode of philosophy beyond Cartesian clarity and
Hegelian opposition with Deleuze.
For Nietzse, dialectic, particularly the Platonic variety, is too optimistic,
taking as its a priori premise that rational argumentation can produce
agreement among the interlocutors, leading to ever-higher domains of truth
and understanding. And though we may recognize the great value in
rational discourse, we can also see that Nietzse is right that something
profound must be repressed, that a whole domain of human experience,
embodied in the figure of Dionysus, must be denied in order to give
aention to the rational daylight consciousness of dialectical intelligibility.
Although the rise of Socratic-Platonic rationality was generally experienced
as a liberating force, and it has ultimately resulted in the modern world in
all its profusion, this rational mode has passed through many complex
permutations, becoming rigid and ossified in the Roman Empire, and then
being dismantled and dissolved by the twin forces of Christianity and
“barbarian” invasion, roughly correlating with the Apollonian and
Dionysian impulses respectively reawakening in more vital form, not in a
mere opposition, but as epoal shis of emphasis. And then again, the
radically novel Christian religion steadily seled into the orthodoxy of late
medieval solasticism, whi was again dissolved in the largely Apollonian
Reformation and the primarily Dionysian Renaissance. rough these
successive ossifications into orthodoxy and periodic dissolutions driven by
the Dionysian, inciting novel Apollonian forms, the rational scientific order
had reaed a new peak in the late nineteenth century, whi called forth
the Dionysian from the most unlikely of sources, a young professor from a
devout family in the staid discipline of philology who came to embody
Dionysus in all of his destructive and transformative creative madness.
 e Dionysian potency is especially embodied in music, whi exceeds
rational thought, speaking directly to the affective heights and depths of
embodied experience. Nietzse discerned the peak of Dionysian musical
aievement in the work of Wagner, specifically Tristan and Isolde, though
his expectation that Wagner’s later work would transcend even this height
to produce an ecstatic reconciliation of German culture in the near future
was not realized, as he was especially disappointed with the Christian tone
of Parsifal, and Nietzse became increasingly disdainful toward Wagner
and the country of his birth, instead taking inspiration from Fren thinkers
and culture in the ensuing years. However, seing aside his extraordinarily
overoptimistic expectation, Nietzse discerns in the narrative of Socrates
himself a more profound, though more obscure, register of the reconciliation
that Nietzse intimated somewhere in the future, perhaps just over a
temporal horizon. He grudgingly anowledges that Socrates was the most
powerful embodiment of a trajectory that preceded him toward
Sopenhauerian individuation, the differentiation of the rational,
autonomous human self from the less conscious, but more deeply embedded
self exemplified in the ancient mystery religions and Aic tragedy. Nietzse
discerns the necessity of this repression of the Dionysian in the figure of
Socrates for the further development of culture, not only enacting a negation
of the Dionysian, but also embodying a different kind of creative force,
initiating the mode of rational thought in whi Nietzse was deeply
immersed, and in whi he greatly excelled, but whi he found oppressive
and limiting.
e episode in the life of Socrates that holds the key to the integration
toward whi we are lured along with Nietzse is the moment when
Socrates, at the very end of his life, has been imprisoned for supposedly
corrupting the youth of Athens with his deeply transgressive free-thinking.
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates describes his daimonion, a divine voice whi
literally speaks to him to warn him against errors in action, though this
voice is not described as being received from the gods, but from something
closer to Socrates’ soul, a personal guiding spirit. is is the specific
innovation that the Athenian authorities found so objectionable, and for
whi Socrates refused to repent, becoming a martyr to rational
individualism and, ultimately, the patron saint of science in his assertion
that salvation and justification can be found in rational intelligibility,
initiating in earnest the millennia-long trajectory of philosophy and natural
science that eventually spread throughout the world, so that “we cannot
help but see Socrates as the turning-point, the vortex of world history.”45
Socrates recounts to his fellow prisoners a dream in whi something that
Nietzse describes as similar to his daimonion instructs Socrates to “make
music!” even though he had always been disdainful of “vulgar, popular
music,”46 whi he had derided as a lower form of expression than
philosophy. Unexpectedly reversing his previous dismissal in a striking
enantiodromia, he obeys the voice and composes a hymn to Apollo,
embracing the nonrational artistic form in praise of Apollonian
intelligibility, whi Nietzse recognizes as the one time in Socrates’ life, as
far as we know, that he implicitly anowledged that the rational, logical
capacity whi privileges intelligibility is limited, and that there are domains
of reality whi exceed intelligibility, whi can only be accessed through a
nonrational kind of wisdom aracteristic of the Dionysian. Nietzse
portrays Socrates as mediating, throughout his life, the eternal opposition
between the theoretical and tragic modes, whi reiterate in the cultural
domain the more ancient and primordial opposition between the Apollonian
and the Dionysian. However, at the very end of his life, Socrates mediates
the reconciliation of these genetically related oppositions, becoming “the
music-making Socrates,”47 an emergent figure who might remind one of Bob
Dylan singing “how does it feel?” in the orus of 1965’s “Like a Rolling
Stone.” Deleuze observes that American popular music “has a mythical role
to play,”48 and Dylan perhaps enacted one fulfillment of the “rebirth of
tragedy” that Nietzse hoped was imminent in his own time, but whi he
would never witness, though even in Ecce Homo, his last complete work, he
writes of his first work: “Ultimately I have no reason to retract my hope in a
Dionysian future for music.”49
Roughly the last third of The Birth of Tragedy dwells with this projected
rebirth in Nietzse’s own time, though we can further extrapolate his vision
to our time, not as a final reconciliation, but perhaps a moment of
emergence into a qualitatively more expansive and intensive mode of
relation, an emergence inextricably entwined with crisis and tragedy.
Nietzse confidently declared that the era of Socratic rationalism and
scientism, whi he portrays as having dominated Western culture for the
last two-and-a-half millennia, was at an end at that moment in 1872, though
it would require another century for this claim to begin to seem plausible
leading up to our own time. Nietzse discerned that science seemed to be
reaing the end of its vitality at that moment in the late nineteenth century,
though in reality, science would rea its highest peaks only a few decades
later in the quantum and relativistic revolutions of the early twentieth
century, but oen at the expense of the naïve reductive rationalism whi
Nietzse associates, perhaps unfairly, with the figure of Socrates. In fact,
Socrates, as portrayed especially by Plato, certainly held a far broader and
more profound view of the world than the nineteenth century scientism that
Nietzse sees as the ultimate orthodoxy into whi the initial Socratic-
Platonic philosophical revolution inevitably degenerated, though it is also
true that the great heights whi science would aain just a few short years
aer Nietzse’s death were driven by the acceptance into science of
domains of reality previously assumed to be beyond the bounds of scientific
inquiry. ese domains notably include the consciousness of the observer
and the probabilistic irrationality of quantum meanics, whi disrupted
the neat determinism of classical meanics, driven by an almost religious
belief in the world’s intelligibility, and in the healing ability of
understanding, whi Nietzse describes as first having emerged in a robust
way with Socrates.
Nietzse contrasts this scientific knowledge with tragic knowledge,
whi recognizes that, no maer how far scientific intelligibility is pushed,
and it has certainly been pushed mu further in our own time than in
Nietzse’s, there is an always-receding horizon beyond comprehension, an
infinite frontier where our most sophisticated and complex logical
formulations break down, becoming paradoxical, confronting us with our
finitude. e profound hunger that resides in us cannot be satisfied by
knowledge alone, whi can never rea a final satisfaction, but also
requires art, particularly music, whi Nietzse employs as a symbol for
Dionysian modes of relation that exceed the Apollonian-Socratic-scientific
pursuit of ordered intelligibility, rather appealing to our affective, intuitive,
and aesthetic faculties, satisfying the hunger whi solitary intellect can
never fulfill, providing a joyful affirmation of life in the face of inevitable
suffering, whi exceeds knowledge and embraces a higher kind of truth.
Returning finally to Apollo and Dionysus, Nietzse describes their
synthesis in the rebirth of tragedy, whi overcomes the operatic form of art
in his own time, similarly contemptible to the New Aic Comedy of the
ancient Greeks, in that it privileges Apollonian sense over Dionysian affect,
rendering music the mere servant of words rather than producing an
emergent integration of sound and text in whi these two elements
mutually support and complement one another. Nietzse discerned this
emergent quality in Wagner, a more dynamic mode visible in the twentieth
century in the expansive efflorescence not only of music, but of visual art,
cinema, literature, philosophy, and many other domains. In concert with the
tragic suffering of the World Wars, the twentieth century seems to have
copiously fulfilled Nietzse’s vision of a rebirth of tragic art, a process
whose extended culmination we may now be witnessing several decades
into the twenty-first century. Like Hegel in 1807, Nietzse recognized in
1872 that “we stand at the boundary between two different modes of
existence,”50 an epoal transition streting across several centuries, from
the era aracterized by the scientific rationality that found its nascent
expression in Socrates, but became dominant in the Enlightenment in the
West, and that may end with the reintegration of the affective and intuitive
empiricisms associated with the Dionysian, variously repressed in this long
ascendance of the rational.
e modern individual can only find satisfaction by becoming uerly
fragmented and destroyed in the tragic Dionysian ecstasy of art, reminiscent
of the Eleusinian mysteries and their rebirth in the psyedelic, musical
counterculture that emerged in the mid-twentieth century, and then carried
ba into consciousness by the theoretical knowledge and psyological
differentiation of the Apollonian-Socratic. is fracturing ordeal further
reminds one of the shamanic initiates who, through some combination of
wilderness solitude, fasting, ecstatic dance, vocalization, and the ingestion of
psyoactive plants, experience a psyological death and dismemberment, a
suffering through whi they are transformed, and from whi they emerge
to bring the esoteric knowledge they have received ba to their cultures, a
nearly universal process in animism on a global scale, though under
disparate designations with many local differences.51 e Dionysian hero of
Aic tragedy, like the shaman, expresses paradoxical knowledge through the
medium of comforting Apollonian illusion, the mythical narrative
intimately entwined with music to transform the collective in an eo of the
initiatory experience of the artist, who carries the deeper burdensome
knowledge of the culture so that the majority of that culture can benefit
from this esoteric wisdom, going about the many activities that make
culture possible with a deep sense of purpose, but safely contained within
the dream of individual egoic selood necessary to act in the world. is
Apollonian illusion deceives the individual group members into believing
that the world is only what it conventionally appears to be in that cultural
moment, while providing a persistent awareness, acquired during the
ecstatic ritual or the tragic Dionysian drama, of deeper forces at play.
It is this synthesis of the two aretypes that defines the peaks of a
culture, both for the ancient Greeks and for our own era, in whi the two
divine figures are understood to be brothers, to be intimately and
inextricably related, so that Apollo and Dionysus finally learn to speak ea
other’s languages, the Apollonian giving form and consciousness to the
mysterious Dionysian wisdom of the unconscious depths. From the
integration of these two aretypal forces emerges the miraculous and the
magical, a robust enantment not only appropriate for ildren or the less
discerning, but necessary to the vitality of a culture, whi requires
foundational myths that satisfy a collective need for complexity and
profundity, myths that are credible to the critical faculty, but that generate
expansive affect with the capacity to impel a culture to overcome itself, to
create novel forms of relation that can carry it further toward an ever-
receding horizon just beyond whi the mythical domain perpetually
resides.
When a culture’s vitality ebbs, when its myths are no longer satisfying,
whi seems to be the case in our time perhaps even more than it was in
Nietzse’s, one must look to ancient precedents for ways to revive one’s
culture, to move, in our case, beyond the double-bind of exclusivist
rationality and its shadow in the reactionary rejection of reason. As
especially discerned by Jung, Deleuze, and Hillman, su an ancient
precedent can be found in the aretypal mode of thought that Nietzse
employs throughout his work to create a novel narrative, building upon
ancient ideas, but adequate to the sophistication and complexity of modern
consciousness, awakening from the slumber of an exclusive privileging of
reductive materialism and logical rationalism against mere superstition into
a more profound domain in whi these privileged modes are maintained,
but resituated within a more expansive mode of relation. rough the
sustained development of a mythical dialectic, the oppositional discord that
still agonizes our culture may be discerned not as mere irreconcilable
difference, but as the eternally returning conflict of potencies demanding
differentiating integration.
Notes
1. Wahl, “Review,” 20.
2. Deleuze, Desert, 128.
3. See, for instance, Nietzse, Birth, 112; Deleuze, Desert, 256.
4. Nietzse, Anti-Christ, 11.
5. Nietzse, Ecce, 48.
6. Stengers, Thinking, 7.
7. Deleuze, Grounding? 59.
8. Nietzse, Gay, 98.
9. Nietzse, Ecce, 48; Deleuze, Cinema 2, 239.
10. Nietzse, Daybreak, 36. e translation of The Birth of Tragedy
employed in this apter renders the two adjectives derived from the
two deities as “Apolline” and “Dionysiac,” but I use and, where
applicable, replace these terms in quoted passages with the more
familiar “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.”
11. Nietzse, Human, 293.
12. Nietzse, Ecce, 73.
13. Nietzse, Beyond.
14. Nietzse, Untimely, 1–56.
15. Nietzse, Ecce, 46.
16. Nietzse, Gay, 89.
17. Mahew 5:5.
18. James, Writings, 337–8.
19. Jung, Archetypes, 19; Tarnas, “Rite,” 16.
20. Deleuze, Nietzsche, 18.
21. Inwood, Heidegger, 128.
22. Salomé, Nietzsche, 40.
23. Nietzse, Birth, 95.
24. Nietzse, Ecce, 45.
25. Nietzse, Ecce, 45–9; Nietzse, Twilight, 199.
26. Deleuze, Logic, 106–8.
27. Deleuze, Desert, 94; Jung, Archetypes, 23.
28. Deleuze, Essays, 133.
29. Prideaux, Dynamite! 337.
30. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 106.
31. Nietzse, Zarathustra, 59.
32. Nietzse, Ecce, 52.
33. Nietzse, Zarathustra, 112.
34. Nietzse, Zarathustra, 177–8.
35. Nietzse, Zarathustra, 122.
36. Nietzse, Ecce, 88.
37. Deleuze, Desert, 256.
38. Nietzse, Birth, 2.
39. Nietzse, Ecce, 42.
40. Nietzse, Ecce, 17.
41. Nietzse, Ecce, 20.
42. Hegel, Logic, 33.
43. Nietzse, Ecce, 26.
44. Nietzse, Ecce, 72.
45. Nietzse, Ecce, 73.
46. Nietzse, Ecce, 70–1.
47. Nietzse, Ecce, 82.
48. Deleuze, Two, 68; Deleuze, Dialogues, 8.
49. Nietzse, Ecce, 48.
50. Nietzse, Birth, 95.
51. Jung, Archetypes, 36–7; See Eliade, Shamanism.
Chapter 7
An Integrated Affair
William James’ Pragmatism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-8

James was not formally trained as a philosopher, though he is considered by

many to be the preeminent American philosopher of the twentieth century,
Whitehead referring to him as “that adorable genius,”1 and Deleuze as “an
astounding genius.”2 He earned his degree as a medical doctor, but never
practiced, and he wrote extensively about psyology in addition to
philosophy. His initial status as an outsider in the philosophical profession
may have had something to do with allowing him to see beyond the oen
fixed debates of his contemporaries, espying a more expansive perspective
rather than becoming mired in “minute controversy,”3 as he puts it in
Pragmatism, whi was originally wrien as a series of lectures. If Descartes
was the primary conceptual persona who initiated modern philosophy, with
Spinoza and Leibniz as the primary post-Cartesians, and if Kant embodied
the peak of modern philosophy, with Fite, Selling, and Hegel as the
primary post-Kantians, as Deleuze suggests, then Whitehead’s qualified
suggestion that James plays an analogous role to Descartes in “the
inauguration of a new stage of philosophy” would perhaps render Bergson
and Whitehead himself as the primary post-Jamesians.4 James certainly
expressed a novel direction in philosophical thought, along with
contemporaries like Charles Sanders Peirce, who coined the term
“pragmatism,” and Bergson, whose Creative Evolution was published in 1907,
the same year as Pragmatism, a very good year for philosophy.
 Although James did not like the name that Peirce had osen for their
mutual mode of thought, James became that movement’s most prominent
theorist, enacting a general tendency emerging at the turn of the twentieth
century, exemplifying the generational emergence of this mode, integrating
disparate philosophical streams traceable ba to the pre-Socratics, whi
“have all at once become conscious of themselves collectively, and of their
combined mission.”5 James was extremely critical of Hegel, making
significant contributions to the by-then popular sport of Hegel-bashing
largely initiated by Selling (who influenced James6), writing in 1909 that
Hegel “offers the vividest possible example of this vice of intellectualism” in
whi “the pulse of dialectic commences to beat and the famous triads begin
to grind out the cosmos,” a conception in whi James discerns an
“intolerable ambiguity, verbosity, and unscrupulousness of the master’s way
of deducing things.”7 Several generations aer James, however, it can
perhaps be recognized that although Hegel and James were certainly
incompatible in some ways, their work contains a profound underlying
coherence. We must inevitably define ourselves in relation to, and oen
against, previous modes of thought, whi James does with Hegelian
absolute idealism, and whi the present text does in a somewhat more
ambiguous register with Derridean deconstruction, even while affirming the
epoal importance of Derrida’s work.
James would perhaps be surprised to discover that a subterranean
resonance is being suggested between pragmatism and the Hegelian
dialectic, “a kind of logic of whi I am the enemy,” James writes in
Pragmatism, whi “entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are

inacceptable.”8 However, as Dewey suggested, James and Hegel had mu

more in common than James supposed. James understood that “the history
of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human
temperaments,”9 and James’ and Hegel’s temperaments, exemplified in their
styles of writing and thought, are certainly very different, even opposed. But
there is a substantial core of similarity in their concepts, whi James seems
to have been mostly unable to recognize because Hegel served as a
conceptual persona against whom James found it necessary to define
himself. But James’ rejection of Hegel, a rejection whose excessively harsh
tone may be partially derived from Selling, is perhaps one of his few
significant misapprehensions, and we can apply the pragmatic method,
brilliantly but imperfectly expressed by James (and whi of us is perfect?),
to James himself.
However, this imperfection is a sword that cuts both ways, as Hegel,
despite the overwhelming potency of his thought, is also certainly
susceptible to critique. For instance, it may seem like heresy to some
Hegelians to suggest that the absolute is not a particularly essential part of
his system. Although Hegel himself holds that the absolute constitutes that
system’s center, one can take it or leave it and still find great value and
depth in the dialectical mode of thought, opposition opening into a
decentered and pluralist dialectic whi Deleuze especially renders
thinkable. One need not necessarily be opposed to the absolute any more
than one needs to be specifically against the concept of a monotheistic
divinity. Rather, these unifying, totalizing concepts simply may not compel
one’s aention as mu as understanding the dynamics through whi
process becomes. Applying Jamesian pragmatism to James’ own relation to
Hegel, it seems that the deepest nature of reality is almost certainly
unknowable, residing at an ever-receding horizon of discernibility, so
disagreeing about whether the world either is fundamentally grounded in a
unitary absolute or in a pluralist multiplicity seems not to be an especially
productive line of inquiry, though the question of how we construct this
reality beyond a fixed grounding is central to this text. Whatever the deepest
nature of reality may be, it will encompass all of the possible categories,
oppositions, and differences we can verbally assign to it, so one can oose
to affirm all of the above in some register. From this perspective, all great
philosophers are right but limited and, as James understood, we do not
ultimately oose where to focus our efforts of conceptual creation and
refinement for rational reasons, but based on our affective proclivities.
However, whereas this insight, that we are not purely rational beings, that
our philosophical beliefs are impelled by our affective inclinations, has oen
been taken by James’ detractors as evidence of an empty relativism and
irrationalism, reduced by lazy readers “to the sad morality of the
businessman,”10 as Stengers writes, providing no grounding for real
knowledge or morality, James’ recognition that temperament drives belief is
resonant not only with an ethical Spinozan freedom of mind, but with the
constructivism, broadly defined, of the theorists below, who were all
influenced by him.11
James was highly aware that the empiricist temperament was at its apex
when he was writing at the turn of the twentieth century, and that this
widespread devotion to empiricism was practiced with a distinctly religious
fervor, a scientistic religion having mostly replaced the older systems of
belief in educated milieus. However, pushing against this dominant mode of
thought, James recognized that, although temperament was not considered a
legitimate basis for the discernment of truth, even the greatest philosophers
are at least as motivated in their theories by their temperament as by
objective facts, if su things can even be said to exist, so that thinkers tend
to divide into “tender-minded” and “tough-minded” and interpret their
experience accordingly.12 Beneath our most sophisticated rationales, we tend
to feel strongly that the thoughts of even the most brilliant theorists whose
temperaments oppose ours are incompatible with the reality that we
experience, just as James does with Hegel. James associates this opposition
of temperaments in philosophy with rationalists, whose aention is
inexorably drawn toward abstract principles, and empiricists, whose
aention is drawn toward the material facts of the world. However, he
admits, we all must partake of both principles and facts, whi find different
emphases in ea of us, though these balances of emphasis are at the root of
some of our deepest disagreements.13 As James describes it, rationalism is
synonymous with monism, whi takes unifying principles as primary, and
applies them to the world’s multiplicity, while empiricism is synonymous
with pluralism, whi takes the multifarious facts of existence as primary,
and derives abstract principles from the many. James thus leads us from the
opposition of rationalism and empiricism to a perhaps more fundamental
opposition of monism and pluralism.14
 However, I would suggest that, in light of James’ lengthy and profound
defense of abstract mystical states in The Varieties of Religious Experience
published five years earlier, James’ self-confessed stance in Pragmatism
perhaps leans more toward the “tough-minded” empiricist as a kind of mild
conceit, a good-natured ploy by a thinker who was actually more moderate
and balanced in this opposition than he presents himself in order to lure
those of an empiricist temperament into a mode of thought more open to the
tender-minded abstractions, though empirically encountered, that he paid
su great tribute to a few years prior.15 Although he does not dismiss
abstraction outright, he seems to position himself as leaning toward the
tough-mindedly empirical mode of thought in order to demonstrate how
one might come to find respect for the rationalist mode through a more
profound kind of empiricism beyond the privileging of material facts
resonant with Selling’s metaphysical empiricism. One could call it a
radical empiricism, a phrase James had previously coined, but whi he
explicitly claims has nothing to do with his project in Pragmatism.16
However, in The Meaning of Truth, published only two years later, James
seems to retract his denial of a connection between the two theories,
writing: “It seems to me that the establishment of the pragmatist theory of
truth is a step of first-rate importance in making radical empiricism
prevail.”17 One suspects that James is playing an ingenious tri in
Pragmatism by claiming the more empiricist role in order to demonstrate
how a mind skeptical of any loy abstractions is able to push that skepticism
deeper, to see its one-sidedness and thereby produce a differentiated
integration of the polarity. is subtle and trister-like seducing of
empiricists into a deeper, broader kind of empiricism that becomes
asymptotically coextensive with rationalism may be what allowed James to
become the primary exemplar in American philosophy of pragmatism, and
the more general multivalent mode of thought traced in these pages. Having
proposed the theory, though, that James is expertly manipulating his
audience, not in a nefarious way, but with sympathy and affection, in a
narrative and pedagogical mode, it is nevertheless abundantly evident that
he harbored a real distaste for Hegel, damning “absolutism” with faint
praise, writing that it “has a certain sweep and dash about it, while the usual
theism is more insipid, but both are equally remote and vacuous.”18 James’
presentation of absolute idealism, though to some extent a caricature, is
correct in that Hegel’s writing, as the primary exemplar of this sool, is
undeniably abstract.
However, I would contend that James goes too far when he claims that
idealism “substitutes a pallid outline for the real world’s riness,”19 as
Hegel’s specificity is of a more psyological kind and, in fact, he was
practicing a kind of radical empiricism, exploring and defining the structures
and dynamics of consciousness whi, as James would surely agree, are real
facts that are inarguably part of the world from whi they emerge and in
whi they are embedded, the mind’s dynamic structure at least partially
disclosing the dynamic structure of reality. Pragmatism, though it is
empirical in its adherence to facts, does not presuppose the abstract principle
of exclusive materialism whi haunts the conventional understanding of
empiricism, but whi is nowhere to be found in the things themselves, so
that pragmatism recognizes the demand that one’s theories must rigorously
negotiate the constraints of actual experience, but it also liberates one from
any implicit assumption about what the limits of a theory may entail, whi
constitutes a broadening of one’s horizon by a devotion only to the actual
state of affairs with the capacity to “carry you somewhere.”20 James’
rejection of absolute idealism seems to have more to do with his distaste for
its style and its contemporary adherents than its inability to carry.
In other respects so modestly wise and generous, James, in relation to
Hegel, takes on something of the aracter of a cranky naysayer, refusing to
see the validity in his own opposite, whi is a great irony given that James,
along with Hegel, has been a primary agent for bringing the mode of
thought whi recognizes opposed views as partial and complementary
aspects of a more expansive reality into broad cultural awareness. But
perhaps his rejection of absolute idealism was a necessary clearing away of
a dominant nineteenth-century mode of thought in order to make room for
a novel mode, whi with another century of perspective can be understood
as complementary to absolute idealism rather than merely antagonistic to it.
James seems genuinely to be working through his frustration with absolute
idealism, as he admits that this mode of thought at least has value insofar as
it serves to provide comfort, whi is structurally similar to his defense of
religious experience, though this recognition takes a negative inflection in
this instance.21 James, apparently holding his nose, is evidently aempting
to apply his own pragmatic method to anowledge the partial validity of
absolute idealism, whi certainly does provide a kind of comfort by
rendering the vast sweep of history as an intelligible, purposive movement.
But James misses what John Stuart Mill – to whom James dedicated
Pragmatism, and whom his “fancy likes to picture as our leader were he

alive to-day”22 – understood: that absolute idealism partially illuminates the

movements of becoming in its discernment of dialectical dynamics.23
Perhaps James went so far over into the need to prove the logical tough-
mindedness of pragmatism to the dominant positivism of his day that he
momentarily forgot he was a pragmatist in relation to Hegelian idealism.
But just because the primary representative of pragmatism seems to have
imperfectly implemented his own theory does not mean that the whole
theory should be discarded, because this kind of inconsistency is the
hallmark of all genuinely novel modes of thought, as James was clearing an
unarted path that is now well-trodden, and we owe a huge amount to his
pioneering efforts.
Speaking to his audience of presumably empirically minded individuals,
addressing the general aracter of his intellectual milieu, James begins to
articulate the common desire for a mode of thought that integrates the
empiricist and rationalist modes. Although James found in Mill a precursor
to the kind of integration that his audience apparently sought, the main lines
of philosophical discourse in that moment were divided between what James
presents as two primary human needs, irreligious empiricism on the one
hand and religious rationalism on the other, a different division than the
typical construction of rationality and religious belief as opposed. In light of
the pragmatic mode of thought, these two impulses can be recognized as
complementary, and even intimately intertwined in the radically empirical
discernment of metaphysical potencies encountered, for instance, in the
various phenomena of religious experience.24 James affirms that this mode of
thought is being teleologically called forth in numerous thinkers, demanding
the integration of various streams expressing the general need to reconcile
the opposed empirical and rational modes differentiated over centuries, a
necessary differentiation of human capacities integrated in a novel mode
yearned for by his milieu, a need felt perhaps even more acutely in our own
time more than a century later.25
James describes the pragmatic method as “primarily a method of seling
metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable,”26 a practical
way of overcoming the apparently fixed debates at the heart of philosophy
(monism and pluralism, fate and free will, materialism and idealism)
impeding further movement beyond the mutual antipathies and
polarizations of modernity. And in expressing this pragmatic method, James
is also applying that method in the integration of previous streams of
thought, whi demand a new name.27 Like the term “idealism” with its
several varieties, “pragmatism” has over the last century entered into broad
discourse, though inevitably shedding most of the essential nuance of its
original philosophical expression. ese terms are oen employed in
political discourse as defining the opposition between an abstract principled
moralism and a concrete practical realism, though many of the people who
use these terms would be surprised to learn that their initial expressions
contain a great complexity whi ultimately allows for, and perhaps even
demands, their integration in a more expansive mode of relation.
James contends that Socrates, Aristotle, Loe, Berkeley, and Hume all
employed the pragmatic method in various ways, and this mode whi
discerns opposites as problematically complementary can be traced at least
ba to Heraclitus in the West. But, according to James, these earlier
expressions were relatively undifferentiated, fragmentary foreshadowings of
the impulse toward integration emerging into philosophical discourse in its
pragmatic form in the early twentieth century.28 It has been necessary for
the opposed modes of thought, the rationalist and empiricist tendencies, to
develop through countless confrontations and partial reconciliations,
through generational reactions and counterreactions, in order for the
demand to arise on a collective scale for the integration of these opposed
modes. Until James’ pragmatic moment, the opposition between monist and
pluralist modes of thought had been highly productive, ea side pushing
against the other in order more fully to differentiate the finer structures of
those respective modes, impelling profound discoveries and inventions on
both the external scientific and engineering end of the polarity, as well as on
the internal psyological and theological end.
However, this polarity, so productive for centuries, has perhaps reaed a
point of diminishing returns so that the debate between these two modes
has become increasingly mired in a fixed entrenment requiring a novel
mode of thought that can dissolve this rigid diotomy. It is striking that this
mode of thought emerged as a predominant philosophical movement at the
same historical moment that a revolution in physics was bringing the
observing consciousness of the scientist inexorably into the practice of
science in a fundamental way, so that the velocity of the observer in special
relativity determines the rate at whi time is passing for that observer
relative to other observers, and the mode of observation in quantum theory
determines whether a photon is a wave or a particle. At this same moment,
Freud and his successors in depth psyology, especially Jung, who
collaborated extensively with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, were
illuminating the depths of the unconscious psye that profoundly informs
our relation to the world, even our most apparently objective scientific
pursuits. Although we may tend to dwell on the spectacularly brilliant
multifariousness of this transformative moment in Western thought in the
realms of science, psyology, and philosophy, we can perhaps also see that
the integration of whi James and pragmatism were primary agents is still
incomplete, and that it falls to later generations, including our own, to carry
this project further by integrating pragmatism with modes against whi it
has defined itself. Pragmatism was a new dialect, building upon and
synthesizing previous ways of using language, and defining itself against
others, whi led to the construction of new facts and new syntheses. But
unlike deconstruction, whi can only devour itself as it performs the
necessary task of problematizing all privileging oppositions, pragmatism,
whether by that name (whi James did not particularly like anyway) or by
another name whi allows more expansive formulations, contains the
positive tools for its self-overcoming built into the very structure of its
theory,29 Deleuze describing pragmatism “as an aempt to transform the
world, to think a new world or new man insofar as they create
themselves.”30
While the specific form that this impulse toward integrating apparently
incommensurable differences took in Jamesian pragmatism largely rejected
Hegelian idealism, this historical opposition, though necessary in its
contextual moment, is not a positive element of pragmatism, but rather the
negation of the other whi was temporarily required for forging a distinct
philosophy. James’ successors, especially Whitehead and Stengers, have
incorporated this pragmatic mode into a more expansive expression of the
virtual potentiality pragmatism embodies, a broader, deeper, and more finely
differentiated totality than even James and his contemporaries were able to
construct, though their efforts are a primary precondition for our capacity to
differentiate between the gis of the pragmatic method and its contingent,
though inarguably brilliant, expression. Absolute idealism formed a
monolithic straw man that James employed to define the pragmatic mode of
thought, whi recognizes that like organisms, our ideas evolve to meet a
panoply of environmental and contextual demands, that this evolution
largely occurs through the development of language,31 and that, like
biological evolution, the development of verbally mediated concepts is
evidently leading, through an inclinational teleology far more subtle than
the blunt instrument of intelligent design with its pregiven ends, toward
increasingly expansive and intensive conceptual domains.
Extrapolating from metaphors employed by James, pragmatism was a
refinement of previous instruments, a vehicle that carried a significant
portion of theorists through the transformative revolutions in all domains of
human endeavor in the twentieth century.32 Rather than the deconstructive
mode whi carefully, painstakingly, and disconcertingly disassembles the
vehicular instrument to reveal its inner workings, problematizing the very
process of vehicular motivity, precluding the possibility of forward motion
by dismantling that whi has been constructed, pragmatism is a kind of
perpetual motion maine whi can be modified as it carries us onward,
becoming ever more organismic and nuanced as it goes, mediating a
progressive development through the negotiation between existing concepts
and novel experience.33 Although the vehicle may now be nearly
unrecognizable as the original, first manufactured over a century ago,
deconstruction has allowed us to peer into the inner workings of the
pragmatic mainery enough to rebuild that maine as it continues its
complex trajectory, enabling the transformation of what could initially be
envisaged as an early automobile but, since the mid-twentieth century, can
be refigured as a roet blasting orthogonally into stratospheric domains,
allowing us to aain more expansive perspectives on terrestrial modes.
We are the inheritors of a cultural vehicle whose obscure origins extend
ba far beyond the modern, as many of our most fundamental beliefs about
the world, inseparable from the language that expresses them, were invented
in the distant past as negotiations between the current doxa and constantly
shiing circumstances. e creative discernment of increasingly profound
concepts is accomplished by marrying those elements of experience for
whi we have language, the medium through whi nonverbal intimations
can be rendered conscious on a collective scale, with the elements whi
have not yet been brought into the light of cultural awareness through the
construction of novel linguistic forms. By means of semiotic invention, we
usher those largely unconscious and potential elements of experience into
the relational systems that constitute our collective mentality, the actually
aieved constraints and potentialities of our existence, not only in spoken
and wrien language, but also in aritecture, apparel, bodily gesture, social
mores, economic structures, and meanical tools whi constitute the given
textures of our collective modes of relation, embodied in a vast web of
differential traces constructed over the course of human history, a distinctly
positive inflection of a primary negative insight of deconstruction.34
ese constructed elements pervasively inform our every thought,
movement, interaction, and emotion, whi are anneled through our
verbal, gestural, and material languages for expressing and framing these
felt and thought encounters with the world in the guise of objects, agential
beings, and our own interiority. Everything we are, know, and do, from our
most basic habits of sleeping, eating, and bathing to our most abstract,
complex concepts and inventions, exists as more-or-less persistent creodes
within an all-encompassing network of relations, a system whi expands
and deepens through the introduction of novel significations, creations that
must be integrated, however problematically, with the totality of our current
modes of relation in order to continue existing. Novel assemblages are oen
constructed in oppositional difference with some previously existing entity
until the two elements, through their mutual tension and desire, find
consummation and a new mode emerges from this relation, oen through
the binary’s dissolution, though there is a multiplicity of topologically
figured differential relations beyond opposition through whi becoming
occurs. e engine for the introduction of novelty embodied in Jamesian
pragmatism integrates disparate modes, including the empirical and the
rational, long differentiated through the scientific and Enlightenment
rejection of the rationalist religious compromise formation embodied in
medieval Christian solasticism, then through the Romantic and Idealist
reactions. is trajectory issued into a moment when even many of the
founders of twentieth century physics, including Plan, Einstein,
Heisenberg, Bohr, Srodinger, and Pauli, sought to reconcile their physical
theories with various metaphysical and religious ideas, not only from the
modern West, but perhaps especially in relation to Eastern and nonmodern
modes.
Pragmatism is open to, and seeks to integrate, every domain of human
experience, finding that empiricism and rationalism, science and religion,
physics and metaphysics are complementary, are ea required to complete
the other. Despite his initial protestations, this method is closely related to
what James meant by a radical empiricism, an empiricism that not only
takes into account quantitatively measurable physical phenomena, but also
qualitative, subjective, affective phenomena whi are, aer all, real facts
that must be encountered on their own terms, that cannot be reduced to
quantitative exteriority without losing the emergent qualitative properties
that constitute these psyological experiences, whether mystical or
mundane.35 e more deeply we delve into the interstices of physical reality,
the more the rigid boundaries between physical and psyological domains
dissolve, in the reintroduction of the observing consciousness in special
relativity and quantum meanics, and then in the last half-century in string
theory, a primary candidate for reconciling the quantum and relativistic
pillars of physics, but for whi there does not seem to be a possibility of
traditional empirical verification on the horizon. In fact, this situation is
impelling many theoretical physicists and philosophers of science to rethink
the privileging of the narrower form of quantitative, materialist empiricism
in favor of a broader empiricism that anowledges internal coherence,
explanatory efficacy, and aesthetic elegance as equally valid criteria to
experimental repeatability for the verification of a theory.36 e
development of physics over the last century seems to be leading inexorably
toward a pragmatic mode of thought whi integrates physics with domains
that have oen defined physics by their exclusion. We are evidently moving
away from the reductive mania aracteristic of modernity’s height, whi
consisted precisely in reducing emergent phenomena to their constituent
parts, toward an integration of materialist modes with a radical,
metaphysical empiricism.
In order to effect this integration, we must recognize that all of our
concepts and theories are approximate inventions that can never capture the
full heights and depths of reality, domains whi always exceed total
comprehension, so scientific and theistic explanations for phenomena are
both valid in their own contexts because they do not ange the specificity
of what actually occurred in the past. James’ contention that the world’s
past is immutably what it is, and our explanations are valid only insofar as
they allow us to enter ba into the stream of experience and engage with
the world in an effective way, suggests that the causal efficacy of both
divinity, in whatever form, and maer are valid truths applicable in their
respective domains, complementary to one another, both legitimate modes
of constructing embodied experience. Both materialism and theism are
coherent explanations for the same past circumstances based on distinct
verbal systems, whi both contain partial validity, and whi are both
useful in different ways for shaping future events. All of our interpretations
are ultimately oriented toward determining our actions, and there are many
decisions in whi the explanatory mode we employ in that moment will
lead us in a fundamentally different direction than if we had employed a
different mode. is recognition impels us not ultimately to privilege one
mode of thought over another, but rather to be able to hold ea explanatory
system within our worldview so that we can employ whiever mode is
more effective in that particular moment, and thus our allegiance may be
given not primarily to one or another, but to a mode whi integrates and
coordinates the narrower modes while maintaining, and even enabling, their
differentiation.37
Rather than rejecting either materialism or some more idealist mode,
whether or not it includes a concept of the divine or rather simply
anowledges the efficacy of formal and final causes in addition to material
and efficient ones, it can be recognized that all of these modes of explanation
and causation are necessary for a more complete comprehension of reality,
whi always exceeds any verbal construct. Neither materialism nor
idealism should be completely rejected and replaced with its opposite if we
hope to remain in contact with the indisputably efficacious discoveries of
these modes. What can be rejected is the exclusive privileging of one mode
over others, so that the negative content of ea mode ultimately constitutes
a recognition of a contrasting mode’s limits of efficacy, and rather than
considering oneself an adherent of materialism or idealism against its
opposite, claiming exclusive access to truth by disqualifying an other, one
might instead position oneself as recognizing the limited efficacy of both
material and ideal modes of thought, employing ea in their appropriate
domain.38 rough a discursive process that looks, to James’ eternal
consternation, remarkably like a dialectical movement, he has led us
through the apparent necessity of oosing one mode of thought over an
opposed mode to the deeper understanding that both the material and
efficient causation privileged by science and the formal and final causation
oen privileged in nonmodern philosophical and religious modes are
necessary for an integral mode of thought, and that they are deeply
intertwined in every occasion that we encounter. James’ shoe, to employ his
prosaic example, admits to explanations in terms of both materialism and
finalism, in terms of both the meanism of its construction and its purpose,
but it is ultimately itself, an entity whi exceeds this diotomy, an object
that has been made both through a meanism and for a purpose.39
James expresses the ultimate question of pragmatism as “What is this
world going to be?” or, what amounts to the same thing as far as we are
concerned, “What is life eventually to make of itself?” In order to generate
satisfying answers to these questions in our evidently liminal epo,
philosophy’s “centre of gravity” will be required to shi from the entrened
opposition of sools of thought aempting to find arguments ingenious
enough permanently to vanquish their opponents to a mode of thought that
recognizes the partial validity in ea mode, whi understands that ea
mode of relation expresses complementary capacities.40 James describes this
gravitational shi as a transformation comparable to the Protestant
Reformation, so that as one contemporary mode of thought, whi we can
perhaps identify as capitalism (including its pervasion of scientific resear),
seems to have triumphed over the others, becoming staid and corrupt like
the Catholic Chur by the early sixteenth century, inhibiting further
progress, we are witnessing, over the course of generations, the emergence
of a mode of thought that takes as its primary principle a radical openness,
affirming the positive aspects of largely repressed modes rather than
shunning and disqualifying them as other.41 However, this emergent mode
cannot simply be conceived as a placid, confluent unification because, in this
integration of disparate modes, there must be room for dissent, for
difference, for plurality, whi in fact constitute the structure of the totality.
We can never hope for a complete unification of all modes of thought so that
every individual holds the same beliefs, whi would produce a repetitive
monotony like that of a beehive, however complex. If we were bees or
lobsters, we would relate to the world in fundamentally different ways than
we do as humans, but as we are definitively not bees or lobsters (despite
spurious claims by a certain contemporary psyologist), su an erasure of
all difference in a totalitarian unification would be to destroy the
ambiguities and disagreements that make us human.42
Rather than su a totalizing unification, James advocates the collective
adoption of a mode of thought whi affirms the aempt to forge a peace,
however fragile and provisional, as a primary principle, recognizing that no
mode contains complete, exclusive access to reality, holding all modes in a
loose, diverse confederation. As James understands, the wisdom of whi
philosophers are the putative lovers comes not from the subsumption of
variety and difference in a single, undifferentiated mode, but from the
collective recognition that all modes elicit some aspects of reality that other
modes inevitably neglect. James constructs the world as becoming
increasingly unified through our activities, bringing all modes of thought
into more intimate relation, a pluralist convergence whi allows James to
describe the universe as an increasingly “ ‘integrated’ affair.”43 is
progressive integration inclines toward a dynamic assemblage in whi ea
mode of construction can play its singular role in the larger narrative,
though as James insists again and again, pragmatism is not merely a drive
toward oneness whi erases difference, but rather a simultaneous
differentiation and unification within an increasingly voluminous domain of
relation. Not every part must communicate with every other part, as a
significant aspect of the world’s truth is discerned in its disjunctions, but
every part is ultimately related in some way to a larger whole, “and wisdom
lies in knowing whi is whi at the appropriate moment.”44 What James
calls pragmatism, what Hegel calls dialectic, or what we might call
integration in order to have some ance of constructing a peace among
these various modes whi seek to integrate apparently incommensurable
differences, are wisdom by other names, though these alternate nominations
are not merely static rephrasings, but dynamic inflections of a multivalent
and speculative mode, partially constituted in the recognition that once-
novel modes periodically require new containers for their continued growth
and development.
Our strivings toward purposes, oen at odds with one another, lure us
toward differentiating integration, as “everything makes strongly for the
view that our world is incompletely unified teleologically and is still trying
to get its unification beer organized.”45 However, although there does seem
to be an inclinational teleology drawing disparate human endeavors toward
increasing integration, “whoever claims absolute teleological unity, saying
that there is one purpose that every detail of the universe subserves,
dogmatizes at his own risk,”46 as su absolutism must ultimately quell all
dissent and difference. But even if absolutism is recognized as an expression
of a less mature stage of historical development that must be overcome, ea
stage must continue to subsist as an integral aspect of an emergent mode,
emphasized less and less in mature individuals, but still constituting phases
that ea person must pass through on the way to maturity, and whi will
enduringly remain as essential baground elements of our collective
constitution. In a process that looks remarkably like the Hegelian dialectic in
another register, James suggests that the first two stages of this
nonhierarical progression, in whi ea stage embodies a valid aspect of
the world’s truth, are roughly equivalent to the nonmodern development of
what we now consider common sense and the modern development of
science, with “at least” a third stage apparently emerging with the pragmatic
“new dawn” at the beginning of the twentieth century, constituted in a
pluralist integration of the modes of thought developed in the first two
stages of human history.47
It is true that all of this philosophizing about a teleologically lured
emergence through progressive developmental stages via the tension and
subsequent integration of difference, whi nevertheless maintains
differentiation is, in fact, a narrative, but this narrative is also an essential
aspect of the world’s constitution. e emerging mode of thought that we
are in the process of collectively constructing is a story we are always telling
ourselves, continuously refining our narrative aesthetic in order to discover
more efficacious ways of relating to experience. But this constructivist
recognition does not mean that this narrative is any less real than some
other, perhaps more tough-minded, reductionist materialist narrative, or a
deconstructive narrative whi seeks to efface narrativity altogether, as from
the pragmatic perspective, narrativity is not something added to reality, but
is partially constitutive of reality itself, and consciousness, history, and
culture are pervasive narrative constructions that allow us continually to
create the world anew, to add unceasingly to the narrative’s nuance and
depth.48
e story that pragmatism tells, the story that integration refines and
extends, and upon whi it builds, is that the world is both one and many,
susceptible to interpretations predicated upon both monism and pluralism,
and a radical empiricism may reveal that the world is moving toward a
progressively differentiated coherence. is narrative seems to be the most
efficacious, to possess the capacity to enfold the greatest volume of human
truths without relegating any truth, however limited and partial, to mere
error. It is more an ideal to strive toward than an aieved way of life,
drawing any exclusivist mode of constructing the world, whether rationalist
scientism or dogmatic religion, into the narrative as an essential aspect of
our collective constitution, as we must all pass through su absolutism,
however briefly, in order to emerge into the more balanced openness
aracteristic of the pragmatic mode. And modes that reject the teleological
inclination toward increasing integration, whether in the form of a bravely
realist reductionist materialism or the sophisticated, elusive ennui of
deconstruction, can be recognized as members in a society of modes, ways
of being that many of us have passed through, that have informed our
current reality and are indelibly part of our being.49
Pragmatism is ultimately pluralist, but it is also paradoxically necessary
to recognize that, if this mode is truly to embrace pluralism, then it must
also anowledge the partial validity of even an absolute monism as a
moment in a process of becoming whi is an essential aspect of the totality
of human existence, a naïve mode of constructing the world appropriate at
an earlier stage, but inappropriate, and oen destructive, at more mature
stages.50 However mu a pragmatic integration may reject su absolutism
in the practice of advocating for a radical openness to difference, this
openness also entails the understanding, relegated to the baground though
it may be on most occasions, that pluralism cannot be true pluralism unless
it absorbs even monism, an organismic metabolization that renders the
emergent mode neither simply pluralism nor monism, but a novel mode that
encompasses and dissolves this pervasive duality. And this novel mode does
not demand perfect tolerance at all times, an impossible task for even the
most enlightened among us, and certainly for any human living in the
everyday world, but rather it invites us to hold our beliefs lightly, even the
belief that there is no absolute truth, the very belief that we must always
hold our beliefs lightly. Integration is an openness to paradox, a recognition
that all modes of relation coexist in various concentrations in ea of us,
that these concentrations shi and fluctuate over time, and that the world
always exceeds our capacity for final comprehension. Paradoxes are the
anomalies that reveal interstices where we can emerge into more expansive
domains, the fissures through whi the light shines that may illuminate the
darkness beyond a bright nucleus of consciousness, the virtual domains of
reality brought into actuality through creative invention.
Peering into these cras in the aracteristically modern mode of thought
reveals a far more complex relation to temporality than the commonsense
construction mathematically formalized by Newton, James alluding to the
“plural times and spaces”51 toward whi the founders of twentieth-century
physics were reaing in their explorations of nonmodern and non-Western
ontologies for explaining the results of their novel discoveries, driven to
these alternative constructions by the inadequacy of the modern conception
of absolute, static time and space. ey found these alternative constructions
of space and time to be more adequate for describing the experience of the
most startling results of modern physics, from the spacetime continuum and
relativistic time dilation to the complementarity of the wave-particle duality,
quantum nonlocality, and the atomic electron transition. String theory
mathematically and conceptually reveals realities even more allenging to
the modern mind, of strange topologies transforming through additional
compactified dimensions expressed in mathematical dualities, constituted in
two radically different but complementary descriptions of the same
phenomenon, out of whi emerges the ten-dimensional reconciliation of
quantum theory and relativity, but also the reconciliation of the five distinct
string theories in an eleven-dimensional M-theory.52
 ese are the esoteric domains to whi empirical observation and
mathematical innovation have led the majority of theoretical physicists, yet
our collective commonsense understanding of these domains of reality is
still largely based upon Newtonian concepts from three centuries ago. And
these are the kinds of novel, enigmatic domains whi pragmatic integration
lures us to contemplate, not only in a mathematically rigorous theoretical
physics, but in an equally rigorous aention to affect, for whi time is
mu more complex than the static, linear absolute temporality of
Newtonian meanics.53 If nothing else, integration demands a radical
openness to novelty, to other ways of conceiving experience, however
apparently bizarre.54 For those of us paying close aention to twentieth- and
twenty-first century physics, our metaphysical speculations are increasingly
hard-pressed to outpace the vanguard of physical theory in terms of
strangeness and novelty. e more we learn about the world, the less we can
cram that knowledge into the Procrustean bed of a primarily reductionist
materialist understanding of reality that has been dominant in modernity.
However, it must be reaffirmed that this radical openness to speculation
does not mean that anything goes. To be pragmatic, we must be both
radically open and rigorously aentive to the many factors that constrain
our speculations, not only the physical constraints accounted for by science,
but also the constraints of the vast semiotic system constructed over
millennia that we call culture. And the passage between these two
monumental facts of given reality, our Scylla and Charybdis, is relatively
narrow and treaerous, but it does admit to forward movement, to
innovation and novelty through the encounter of our wilder fancies with
that whi undeniably exists. Our novel concepts must not only work in
relation to the physical reality in whi we find ourselves, but they must
also be expressed and framed in ways that can be heard and adopted by
enough individuals to generate a critical mass, at whi point the
incorporation of these concepts becomes feasible, and even necessary. ere
are many books that simply assert radical novelty without taking the
necessary care not only to fit the new theories to material and social facts,
but also to express them in aesthetically efficacious enough ways to
convince others provisionally to embrace novel beliefs beyond their current
modes of thought, not only based on rational considerations, but affective
ones, an undertaking whose extraordinary difficulty James aptly
recognizes.55
Our current modes of thought, vastly complex and profound though they
may be, always provide incomplete conceptions of reality, unfinished
vehicles for sailing into unarted domains. e figure of absolute truth is an
asymptotic lure toward becoming that impels our self-overcoming, requiring
that we always continue to revise our theories and modes of relation. As
James understood, there is something in us, and consequently in the reality
of whi we are a part, that will not allow us to rest, that drives us ever
onward past even the most brilliant constructions, so revelatory in their first
emergence. And this overcoming of our current modes of thought may
partially result from an emergence into broad awareness of the oen esoteric
recognition that we are not merely seekers aer some external truth that lies
waiting, fully-formed somewhere in the depths of maer or in the heights of
a transcendent domain, but that by integrating, through our various modes
of embodied and enminded experience, the oppositions and differences that
constitute our thought, we are increasingly building the immanent truth for
whi we seek, not as a castle in the air laing foundation, but as an
always-moving vehicle constructed in constant negotiation with the
multifarious facts of experience, venturing into ever-new terrain.
Notes
1. Whitehead, Science, 2.
2. Deleuze, “Whitehead.”
3. James, Pragmatism, vii.
4. Deleuze, Expressionism, 325; Whitehead, Science, 142–3.
5. James, Pragmatism, vii.
6. Wilshire, “Breathtaking,” 103, 106.
7. James, Writings 1902–1910, 678.
8. James, Pragmatism, 31.
9. James, Pragmatism, 2.
10. Stengers, Thinking, 112.
11. See also Bergson, Mind, 177.
12. James, Pragmatism, 2–3.
13. James, Pragmatism, 3.
14. James, Pragmatism, 4.
15. James, Pragmatism, 4.
16. James, Pragmatism, viii.
17. James, Writings, 826; Stengers, Thinking, 112.
18. James, Pragmatism, 6–8. James specifically critiques “the Anglo-
Hegelian sool,” though he critiques Hegel directly in The Will to
Believe and A Pluralistic Universe.
19. James, Pragmatism, 28.
20. James, Pragmatism, 29.
21. James, Pragmatism, 29.
22. James, Pragmatism, v.
23. Mill, Works, 139.
24. James, Pragmatism, 8, 13.
25. James, Pragmatism, 16.
26. James, Pragmatism, 18.
27. James, Pragmatism, 19.
28. James, Pragmatism, 20.
29. James, Pragmatism, 22–3.
30. Deleuze, Essays, 86.
31. See Riardson, Natural.
32. James, Pragmatism, 23.
33. James, Pragmatism, 64.
34. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 25.
35. James, Pragmatism, 31.
36. See Dawid, String.
37. James, Pragmatism, 37–9.
38. James, Pragmatism, 41.
39. James, Pragmatism, 43, 69.
40. James, Pragmatism, 47.
41. James, Pragmatism, 48.
42. James, Pragmatism, 50, 65.
43. James, Pragmatism, 53.
44. James, Pragmatism, 53.
45. James, Pragmatism, 54.
46. James, Pragmatism, 55.
47. James, Pragmatism, 72.
48. James, Pragmatism, 55.
49. James, Pragmatism, 60.
50. James, Pragmatism, 62.
51. James, Pragmatism, 68.
52. Greene, Elegant, 298.
53. James, Pragmatism, 70.
54. James, Pragmatism, 71–2.
55. James, Pragmatism, 83.
Chapter 8
A True Work of Integration
Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-9

Bergson and James both profoundly admired and influenced ea other.
James was planning to write a preface to the English translation of Creative
Evolution for its publication in 1911, though he died before he was able to
complete it, and Bergson wrote a sympathetic and insightful preface to the
Fren edition of Pragmatism, also published in 1911.1 Bergson thought
deeply about Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel, and he read Nietzse, whose
subterranean influence seems evident in his work, though he directly
addresses him only once in his final monograph.2 Bergson’s career, though
not as dramatic as Nietzse’s, is one of academic success at the relatively
young age of thirty with his first book, though it is with the publication of
Creative Evolution that Bergson became a genuine philosophical celebrity,
influencing all of the theorists discussed below, and winning a Nobel prize
for literature in 1927. However, perhaps in reaction to his extraordinary
eminence in Fren philosophy in the first few decades of the twentieth
century, similar to the reaction against Hegel’s even greater dominance in
the previous century, and partially catalyzed by a debate he had with
Einstein,3 Bergson’s influence began to wane in the thirties, and he died in
1941. en, in an unexpected reversal, his star rose abruptly again in the
1960s largely through his influence on Deleuze, who published Bergsonism
in 1966, and Bergson has since remained highly regarded within continental
philosophy, perhaps especially as a precursor to Deleuze himself.
 Bergson’s subtle argument begins with the suggestion that intelligence
has evolved primarily to act on maer, and thus intellect tends to conform
to the contours of the materiality whi is its natural sphere of efficacy. e
primary aracteristic of both maer and intellect, as Bergson defines them,
is their differentiability, the susceptibility of maer to being indefinitely split
up into its constituent parts, and the intellect’s tendency to analyze
experience in a similarly discontinuous and reductive way, not only in
relation to maer, but to any content, however abstract. e logic whi
comes so naturally to our minds is modeled on the spatial, geometrical
organization of physical maer, as maer and intellect have participated in
a mutual adaptation in the production of mind. Bergson contrasts this
tendency of intellect to life, whi he describes as an inverse movement to
materiality, a nondifferentiable trajectory toward increasing order
countervalent to the entropic movement of nonliving maer toward
disorder, and he suggests that this vital evolutionary movement tends to
escape the naturally reductive bent of our intellect, molded as it is on inert
maer.
But evolutionary theory, especially in the early twentieth century, has
generally sought to reduce organismic vitality to its component meanisms,
a mode of thought whi has enjoyed great success in physical science, but
whi possesses a restricted efficacy in describing organismic processes,
though Bergson admits that this reductive tendency has been a necessary
stage of biological science, whi has been highly productive in these
restricted meanical domains. is reductive quality of the intellect is not
merely contingent, but expresses the aracter of the materiality on whi
intellect has molded itself in order to act, and whi tends to pull our more
abstract conceptual thought, mediated through language whi has evolved
coextensively with the material aracter of intelligence, toward the static
repetition of meanical automatism. e meanistic tendency of intellect
implicitly assumes that individual parts are external to one another, divisible
down to increasingly tiny constituent elements, though as the new physics
that were just beginning to be understood in 1907 demonstrate, every point
in geometrically defined space is intimately related to every other point, a
prescient insight in a book published only two years aer Einstein’s annus
mirabilis.
rough almost novelistic prose, Bergson enacts the flowing movement of
the vital impulse, whi carries us along in its forward thrust, but is also
variously diverted into conceptual and imaginal eddies and whirlpools, so
that the experience of reading this text performs the complex vital processes
described. is philosophical approa, so influential in the continental
tradition, can be contrasted with mu analytic philosophy, an opposition
exemplified in Bergson’s disagreements with Bertrand Russell, who led the
arge in employing formal logic to reduce experience to its constituent
elements in order to analyze complex processes.4 Contrary to this approa,
whi categorizes concepts, externally related to one another like the spatial
objects they mirror, into an endless confrontation of discrete philosophical
positions ending with “–ism,” Bergson finds more efficacy in evocatively
spiraling in upon the concepts he wishes to convey, whi exceed the ability
of formal logic to contain, leading to irresolvable incommensurabilities and
paradoxes, whi only a method beyond the logic developed in relation to
maer can hope to conjure.
e inverse capacity to intellect, molded on the vital impulse, is instinct,
an expansive field of felt organismic experience of whi intellect is a
condensed nucleus, a bright spotlight illuminating a restricted domain,
around whi fades off in all directions domains that exceed the grasp of
verbal intellect, but whi are accessible to instinctual bodily knowledge, a
duality reminiscent of Nietzse’s Apollonian and Dionysian. While intellect
has become conscious of itself, instinct is an unconscious adherence to the
vital movements of process, a felt tracing of the real contours of lived
activity complementary to intelligence. Life is a wave moving through the
medium of maer, and while maer tends inexorably toward descent into
entropic stasis, the vital impulse is embodied in the oscillations that animate
materiality, whi flow in a countervalent direction, ascending toward
increasing organization and freedom of movement liberated from physical
determinacy. e vital wave passes through generations of organisms whi
it animates, becoming more potent and intense as it advances through
countless repetitions with slight differences, rather than diminishing in
potency as it branes into novel differentiated species. is process of
surging differentiation enacts a developmental dissociation of diverse
capacities, so that species tend to privilege certain faculties at the expense of
others, and these faculties tend to become increasingly developed while the
faculties dominant on other evolutionary lines are deemphasized by this
selective differentiation, though these other faculties are flames never
completely extinguished.
e evolutionary movement is not a single trajectory executing
predetermined biological laws, tracing increasing degrees of consciousness,
from plants to animals to humans, as most theories descended from Aristotle
have assumed, but rather a vital tendency toward the liberation from
physical determinism, a multiplicitous differentiation radiating out in all
directions toward all kinds of possible adaptations. is radiating movement
begins at the smallest scale, with protozoa, single-celled organisms whi
establish a toehold for the emergence of life from maer, and then divide
and aggregate into assemblages until a crisis is reaed in whi the society
of unicellular organisms finds it necessary to self-organize into multicellular
organisms, whi diverge in every possible direction. Opposed by the
inhibiting aracter of materiality, the vast majority of these trajectories are
drawn ba into the entropic tendency of material necessity, canalized by
the constraints of physical reality into habitual, circular eddies that inhibit
further development. Out of this efflorescent polyvalent surge, only a few
trajectories, plants and animals, find salutary paths beyond the various
constraining obstacles of materiality – though Bergson recognizes that fungi
complicate this binary distinction5 – a conflict whi constitutes the essence
of evolution, aggregating increasingly complex assemblages of assemblages,
whi contain increasing differentiation and division of labor within their
organismic unity. Aer periods of relatively linear growth, these
assemblages rea a population crisis so that the aggregate is either faced
with extinction or must organize itself in an emergent domain of liberated
activity, a dynamic of accumulation and disarge whi has never ceased to
be operative.
 ere is thus a fine balance maintained between the differentiation of
individuals and their integration in emergent entities, whether organismic,
psyological, or societal, as in order for the organismic entity to evolve, to
become other than it has already been, it is necessary for it to reproduce, for
its individuality to be imperfect and permeable with its environment and
other organisms, producing other individuals out of its own body, a
becoming-other than itself in order to reunite with itself, whi, as above,
looks remarkably like the movement described by the Hegelian dialectic,
though in a pluralist valence. And the relation of sociality between
individual and collective entities, operative across scale in all vital domains,
from individual organisms and psyes, to the evolution of species, to the
development of societies, only requires a slight impetus at the critical
moment to tip the assemblage from an unorganized aggregate to an
organismic unity that preserves the differentiated individuality of the
component organisms. In the individual human organism, for instance,
puberty and menopause are crises that serve to reorganize the individual,
reiterating the distinct stages, mediated by critical thresholds, of larval and
embryonic modes of development, as well as the brief periods of punctuated
saltation that mediate the evolutionary transitions between distinct species.
e nervous system, and eventually the brain, is the primary site of this
self-organizing complexity in the trajectory that leads to humanity, whi in
turn requires greater complexity in the other organic systems to support
nervous complexity, the automatism of the rest of the organism structured to
provide the nervous system with increasing freedom and oice in its
activity. is duality of automatism and freedom constitutes the axis that
defines vegetable and animal life, not in complete, perfect opposition, but in
a difference of emphasis, so that both kingdoms contain both elements in the
polarity, but the automatic is emphasized in plants and the voluntary is
emphasized in animals. And this freedom of oice is the trajectory that
leads to consciousness, a becoming-aware of manifold potentialities for
liberated activity and invention. But even in the most complex forms of
consciousness, the oen antagonistic emphasis of one end of the polarity
over the other results not in an ultimate triumph, a complete destruction of
one tendency or the other, but in various modes of integration of the
opposing tendencies, different balances of emphasis whi maintain the
complementary contrasts of fixity and mobility in different kinds of
organismic wholes. And as the brain becomes increasingly complex,
consciousness becomes increasingly emphasized over the instinctual
capacity until it reaes a threshold that marks the discontinuous transition
from nonhuman animal consciousness to the human mind.
However, it should not be inferred that mind is reducible to the brain, but
rather that consciousness and its physical substrate can only be definitively
described as corresponding to one another, both primary realities, neither
subservient to the other, and not equivalent to one another, but rather two
complementary and interdependent ways of delineating a larger reality that
exceeds both systems of symbolic aracterization, whi respectively
operate in terms of external structural complexity and internal cognitive
intensity. e transition from nonhuman to human consciousness is a
difference in kind whi emerges coextensively with a difference in degree
of complexity of interconnection, so that while the oice available to
animals is circumscribed by relative la of complexity, the human mind is
potentially unlimited in its capacity for liberated activity. e moments
when we practice this radical freedom and openness to its full extent are
relatively rare, though our conscious activity certainly takes place at the
qualitative analogy of a higher order of magnitude than the almost
completely instinctual activity of nonhuman animals.
One of the primary defining aracteristics of intelligence is invention,
the ability to design and manufacture tools and habits whi serve as
extensions of our biological and mental capacities, not only tenological
devices and ways of organizing material elements, but also language. As
opposed to instinct, whi limits the possible avenues of activity, intelligence
can discover new degrees of freedom through its inventions, and it is oen
the case that the transformative effects of novel inventions, forms of
language, and habitual modes of activity and relation do not even become
visible until they have seled into being unremarkable, having made the
transition from a tenological, verbal, or behavioral curiosity to a
commonplace and integral element in daily life.
In order to differentiate the human intellectual capacity, the instinctual
capacity has tended to be deemphasized over the course of our evolutionary
and historical development. Our senses are relatively dull compared to those
of other mammals, due in part to the radical disembedding from nature
undertaken with the invention of clothing, shelter, cooked food, and
language, not to mention the modern city in whi most natural surfaces are
covered by artificial materials, in whi the stars in the night sky are barely
visible due to the ubiquity of electric lights, and in whi many of our
interactions with other humans take place through electronic media and
text. We have come very far from the relatively pure instinct of nonhuman
animals, and although we have gained a huge number of novel, emergent
capacities over the course of historical development, not least self-
awareness, we have also paid the heavy price of alienation from instinctual
modes of relation. As Bergson expresses it, “there are things that intelligence
alone is able to seek, but whi, by itself, it will never find. ese things
instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them.”6 Our conscious
intellectual capacity perpetually seeks aer novelty, but divorced as it has
become from instinctual, affective knowledge, and although it has been a
necessary differentiation, it oen las the intimate sense of purpose for
whi felt instinct is the aracteristic faculty. Conversely, instinctual
animality does not possess the consciousness required to know that there is
something to be sought, emergent novelties that allow organismic processes
to overcome themselves in order to aain broader modes of existence.
Intellect discerns a variety of external objects and concepts, while instinct
feels its way through the internal interconnection of these apparently
disparate individualities, the integration of whi has generally been
precluded by a nearly exclusive focus on rationality, if not always
intelligence, by modern industrial society.
Intelligence tends to think in terms of fixed, separate objects and states, so
even when it is faced with an emergent self-organizing novelty like
biological life, it seeks to understand organismic process by reducing it to its
constituent elements, blind to the integral vitality that is the domain
accessible to instinct. When predicting the future, or evaluating creative
novelty, solitary intellect generally assumes that things will go on as they
have before, that nothing fundamentally new can come into being, only
reorganizations of existing elements. And while this may be true from a
materialist perspective, as energy can neither be created nor destroyed, from
the inverse perspective accessible to affective epistemologies, the
conventional materialist mode is blind to the animating force of becoming
ascending wavelike through descending maer. e complementary modes
of relation enacted in intelligence and instinct ea tend to adhere to the
contours around whi they have formed themselves, the meanical and
the organic. However, as Bergson suggests, this polarity is not a mere
disjunction, but an invitation to integration, a turning of the conscious
aention differentiated in the intellectual faculty to the task of rendering
conscious the unconscious affective knowledge accessible to instinct, an
integration toward whi we seem to have progressed considerably in the
century since Bergson wrote, not only in the broad academic interest in
affect derived in large part from Spinoza, Bergson, and their mutual
influence on Deleuze, but also in the efflorescence of countercultures, whi
have served as primary loci for the integration of affective and intellectual
modes.
is integration of intelligence and instinct is enacted in the emergent
capacity of intuition, Deleuze nominating Bergson’s approa to this faculty
as “one of the most fully developed methods in philosophy,”7 and Bergson
describing intuition in 1903 as “integral experience,”8 a metaphysical method
for integrating the precise geometrical discernment of intellect, whi
divides actions into constituent elements, with the felt continuity of affective
experience. Intuition constitutes an awakening of the intimate bodily
knowledge derived from the creative novelty aracteristic of vital flux,
whi has been multivalently emphasized in nonhuman evolutionary
trajectories, a broadening of the horizon of felt awareness from immediate
sensory experience into the more abstract domains accessible to intellect.
Intelligence is a becoming-external and other to itself, an unmistakably
dialectical liberation whi has allowed human consciousness to see far into
the depths of space and maer, but whi has also alienated it from itself, so
that in order to reunite with itself, to overcome this self-othering, it must
turn the extraordinarily potent and intensive aention forged in relation to
maer ba upon itself, ba into the flowing movements of its bodily and
psyological embedding by means of an intuitive method, carrying the
unconscious felt knowledge of vitality into the light of conscious awareness.
And it is this intuitive “supraconsciousness”9 that is both the origin and
purpose of life, whi must be constructed in actuality through the process
of an integration that maintains the differentiated components.
Bergson suggests that it is our inventions – tenological, cultural,
linguistic – whi form the preconditions for our self-overcoming, enabling
new modes of complex feeling, emergent platforms for more elevated
activations of bodily knowledge providing the material and conceptual
frameworks that we can ascend in order to witness new vistas beyond our
previous horizons of experience and conception, constructing those novel
domains in reciprocal negotiation with virtual potentiality and constraint.
Without the logical, geometrical, meanical quality of intelligence, we
would have laed the tools necessary to build the structures that allow our
increasingly towering perspectives, but it is our intuitive capacity, beyond
the duality of intellect and instinct, whi feels drawn to build these
structures, and to climb the heights that we have constructed to explore the
vastness of the world rather than only focusing aention on the tenical
allenges of engineering more durable joists and struts. ese structural
elements are necessary for the ascent, but not sufficient for their
employment, whi requires an aesthetic, affective mode of relation. In this
light, intelligence is a means to an end, not an end in itself, so that we must
go beyond a focus on solitary intellect, whi has been singularly
instrumental in paradoxically constructing the means of its own overcoming
and subsumption into an emergent mode of relation for whi the rigorous
analytical capacities are maintained, but are toppled from their privileged
hierarical position to become one valid, but partial, kind of knowing
among others, a symbolic construction complementary to other contrasting
relational systems within the totality of potential experience.
Despite the potentially radical openness that human consciousness
affords, we find it necessary to reduce the infinite expanse to a manageable
complex of conceptual premises that constellate our mode of relation, whose
development resonates with the same dynamics as biological evolution, so
that we can recognize our current mode of existence not as an end but as a
stage in a trajectory moving through us and beyond us, an insight deeply
reminiscent of Nietzse’s concept of the Overman. Bergson even suggests
that a “superman”10 may emerge from an integration of the disparate
trajectories that the vital impulse has traced in order to differentiate and
refine these faculties, and whi it is the task of an intuitive method to
integrate in a novel mode whi maintains the long-privileged intellectual
capacity of humanity, but reembraces the instinctual capacities aracteristic
of animality, whi have been repressed and rendered as other in the
protracted differentiation of the human.
Implicit thus far in this “thinking with” Bergson’s theory is his essential
concept of duration, the continuous and nondifferentiable lived experience
of “time freed from measure,”11 as Deleuze writes, whi Bergson contrasts
with the clo and calendar time aracteristic of science, logic, intellect,
linear writing, and common sense that generally constructs temporality as
divided into separate moments on a timeline. e ultimate expression of this
cuing up of time is the differential calculus, a geometrical approa
traceable ba to the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea near the dawn of philosophy,
Bergson suggesting that this mathematical reconstruction of continuous
ange and movement out of fixed and immobile units is a paradox whi,
although it allows for asymptotic approximations of ange, can never truly
capture the continuity of duration. Bergson likens this method of
reconstituting time to the cinematograph, invented a mere decade-and-a-
half before Bergson’s book was published, in whi the illusion of
movement and ange is produced by the rapid succession of static images,
arguing that this tenology is in fact the logical extension of the material-
intellectual mode to the construction of temporality. However, like Leibniz,
Bergson discerns an intimate correlation between the specifically
infinitesimal form of the integral calculus and the conceptual integration
aracteristic of the intuitive method, so that he can write in 1903 that “one
of the objects of metaphysics is to operate differentiations and qualitative
integrations”12 explicitly modeled on the calculus. Bergson rejects the
ambition to construct “a universal mathematic,”13 whi he associates with
Kant’s conception of metaphysical law, just as he rejects the fixed,
transcendent Platonic Ideas in favor of a mode of metaphysical thought
whi, like the infinitesimal calculus, constitutes “a true work of
integration,”14 as he writes in 1896, tracing the contours of immanent
becoming rather than merely uncovering preexisting transcendent Forms,
the syncategorematic quality of the infinitesimal mediating the phase
transition from quantitative discontinuity to qualitative continuity.15
In order to apprehend the continuous reality of time, we must not remain
external to it, as the “cinematographical meanism of thought”16 does, but
rather insert ourselves into becoming through the intuitive method whi
lends aention to affect, the faculty whi corresponds with the vital
movement. It is this duration that underlies the progressive quality of time, a
continual surging that demands novel forms of life and consciousness,
accreting small anges whi, when critical thresholds are reaed, tips the
process into emergent durational phases, so that there is both continuity in
the slow accretion and discontinuity in the brief periods of condensed
experience that mark the transitions to novel durations. Duration is the
medium of the vital impulse, the will and desire whi exceed conscious
oice and impel becoming, more accessible to affective epistemologies than
intellectual ones. Whereas science generally requires static, absolute time for
experimental repeatability, the concept of duration constitutes the
recognition that no moment or state can ever be precisely the same (eoing
Heraclitus), and this irreducible forward movement is the aspect of reality
whi eludes the grasp of science and intellect prior to their subsumption in
the radical empiricism of the intuitive method, whi, as in Spinoza, allows
consciousness freely to oose the modes of expression for unconsciously
determined affective will. Although, in retrospect, the events that occur in
time can be explained meanically in terms of maer and physical forces,
reduced to the rearrangement of existing elements, events involving
organisms are not determined in advance, evincing a creative freedom
whi becomes increasingly expansive the more conscious an entity
becomes. It is this durational continuity to whi intuition provides the kind
of access that intellect alone never can, integrating verbal conceptuality with
the affective reality of bodily experience by means of the sustained aention
of intellect to durational fluctuations, whi expands one’s purview from the
entropic monotony of pure intelligence to a recognition that maer is the
medium through whi the creative impulse of life moves.
e duality of meanistic and teleological modes of explanation, efficient
and final causation, plays an essential role in Bergson’s conception of
duration, as although he anowledges the efficacy of both kinds of
causation, he does not think that either is privileged, but rather that they are
two verbal modes of construction whi reality exceeds, and whi
correspond to partial aspects of that reality. For the intellectual mode of
thought that has developed primarily in relation to maer, efficient
causation (and implicitly material causation) is the aracteristic causal
mode, for whi everything that occurs is caused by material elements
pushing from the past, and for whi these elements are merely rearranged.
In this radically meanistic causal mode, nothing really novel can come
into being, as every moment, every new state of reality, is merely a
reorganization of maer that theoretically could have been known in
advance by an intellect sufficiently powerful to calculate the trajectory of
every particle in the universe, and thus the world in its entirety is
deterministic and eternally given. is is the logical consequence of the
mode of thought, privileged in modernity, that asserts the exclusive validity
of material and efficient causation. Applied to evolution, this exclusivist
materialism leads to the Darwinian theory of natural selection, so that,
although it is true in the negative sense that natural selection eliminates the
majority of vital trajectories that cannot discover a mode conducive to their
survival and propagation, Darwin’s theory does not explain the vital
impulse itself, the recognition that there is a tendency in the nature of
reality continually to move, over billions of years, through periodic
saltations, sudden transformative reorganizations of relatively static
development, toward increasing novelty, freedom, and consciousness. For
Bergson, this pervasive efflorescent surge can only be explained retroactively
through efficient causation, but it requires final causation to explain why the
radiating trajectories exist at all.
However, Bergson is nearly as critical of more traditional, radical forms of
teleology as he is of pure meanism, because radical finalism generally
posits a specific design (and thus usually a designer) aiming toward pregiven
ends. In contrast, Bergson recommends a more subtle form of final causation
in whi the ends that species evidently strive toward are not given in
advance in their specificity, but are the results of a teleological inclination
toward novelty of all kinds rather than any particular form of novelty, an
analogue of magnetism luring life toward its self-overcoming. e vast
majority of the radiating trajectories have been obstructed in their flights,
drawn into circular eddies by the rugged topology of the durational terrain
they traverse, halting the advance into novelty at various degrees of
complexity and freedom, seling into disparate static emphases of
photosynthetic, motor, perceptual, and cognitive capacities. But the
trajectory leading to the human has perhaps uniquely managed to avoid
being drawn aside, serving as the primary stream that has continued its
ascent to increasing liberation from material determinacy by means of
increasing nervous complexity, and thus consciousness, though this
consciousness could have taken radically different forms, and in fact may
have taken them on other planets orbiting other stars.
Only by employing both modes of causation as partial and
complementary can we hope to begin to construct a conceptual
understanding of the entire process. And in order to accomplish an
integration of these two modes of causation through the intuitive method,
the aention of intellect, with its genealogical affinity for meanism, must
be directed toward the instinctual affective knowledge more intimately
related to the subtle inclinational teleology of the vital impulse, these modes
describing perpendicular planes abstracted from a more expansive
topological manifold. Neither mode provides ultimate access to the
durational reality of the vital movement, but it is through the integration of
these two contrasting causalities that a deeper domain exceeding causation
can begin to be discerned, as these modes are verbal constructions of a
reality that has bodied us forth along with our linguistic, conceptual,
affective, and aesthetic faculties. As with Zarathustra’s evocation of
something beyond reconciliation, the integration of efficient and final
causes, and of the faculties of intellect and instinct in intuition, does not
merely posit a mode in whi both are partially true (an insight also
expressed by Hegel17), though this positing itself contains partial truth, but
gestures in a direction that exceeds and dissolves the duality, that is always
already integrated, but whi we are still creating the conceptual language
to express in itself rather than as a union of disparate elements. is is the
difficult task toward whi integration calls us, something beyond the
reconciliation of opposites, deeper than the dialectic, more subtle and
expansive than the pragmatic method, though all of these modes have
carried us very far in the direction of this integration, whi does not seek to
suppress discord, but rather draws the discordant elements increasingly into
relational contrast and complementarity as the constitutive laice from
whi a novel mode may emerge. If only we can find the words to express it,
the concepts, inventions, and forms of life sufficient to carry it from
potentiality into actuality, this novel mode, far from fixing reality in a static
logical systematization, will constitute a radical opening to wider horizons
driven by discordant profusion as mu as by harmonious unification, an
integration beyond the many and the one.
As with radical finalism, Bergson critiques the notion of eternal formal
causes, the Platonic Ideas. However, whereas with final causes he expends
considerable effort articulating a novel, more subtle conception of
teleological inclination, his discussion of formal causation is relatively
limited and primarily critical, with only a few hints from whi might be
extrapolated a more subtle conception of formal causation to accompany the
teloi to whi Ideas have generally been considered the counterpart since
antiquity, as origin to end. In su a reimagining, whi Deleuze produces
partially through his appropriation of Bergson’s concept of the virtual in
Matter and Memory, formal causes would not be understood as given
transcendent Forms, but as formal potentialities and constraints in the
moving topology of process, a landscape continually transformed by the
vital impulse flowing over it, carving annels around immovable obstacles,
sweeping accumulating elements along in its flood. In fact, these riverine,
geographical images are borrowed from Bergson’s multifarious evocation of
the vital impulse, whi he does not quite seem to have explicitly realized
could serve as precisely the way to reimagine formal causes that we require.
Jung, for whom Bergson expressed “great respect,”18 reconceived formal
causes as aretypes, describing them as “like riverbeds”19 rather than as
static essences, while Whitehead undertook a similar reimagining in his
conception of the (misleadingly named) eternal objects, and Deleuze
variously evokes formal causes in his conceptions of the virtual, quasi-
causes, Ideas, simulacra, and multiplicities.
Bergson describes Plato’s invention of the concept of Ideas as a natural,
and even necessary, extension of the aracter of intellect. Nevertheless, this
Platonic mode of thought is inadequate for comprehending the organismic
reality in whi we are constantly immersed, amounting to a Procrustean
cramming of experience into rigid, predetermined categories, whi is the
appropriate and efficacious way of explaining the dynamics of material
elements through physical laws, but whi it is the aracter of durational
vitality always to exceed. is radical kind of formal causation constructs
disparate entities in separate durations as merely degraded or aenuated
copies of a superabundance of transcendent eternal Forms, and this
transcendent domain is more real than the phenomenal world of experience.
Although Bergson anowledges that this conception of Forms has been
extraordinarily productive in its instrumental capacity, implicit even in the
mathematically formulated laws of modern science, he ascertains the same
error in the domain of eternal Forms or physical laws as he does in the
pregiven teleological ends whi he thoroughly revises, so that it requires
only the smallest leap to extrapolate the revision exercised on final causation
to formal potentialities.
 It is intuition, conscious aention to affective experience, that allows us to
begin to conceive the shape of formal potentialities of a more subtle and
fluid aracter than the Forms, feeling our way through the infinitely
complex potentialities and constraints, the folds and inflections, the
obstacles and flows of reality with whi life and consciousness find it
necessary to negotiate in their progressive urge toward novelty and
liberation from physical determinism. ese potentialities are not ultimately
separate, completely disparate entities, but tendencies resulting from a
multiplicity of rills over the contingent features of a topological landscape
that exceeds the grasp of solitary intellect, and whi we can affectively
discern through the intuitive method. is method is figured as a fringe
around the bright nucleus of intellectual illumination, the faint light at a
liminal horizon of conception, whi reminds one of Nietzse’s evocation
of the horizon as the endlessly receding locus of mythological aretypes,
conceivable in Bergsonian terms as canalizations, trans-spatiotemporal
trajectories that have been carved by vital flows through more expansive
degrees of freedom over a virtual landscape. is reimaging of formal
potentiality would constitute a fundamental rupture with the metaphysics
implicitly dominant from the ancient Greeks through most modern
philosophy, a novel mode in whi new forms are continually being created
in relation to the potentialities and constraints of temporal and material
necessity. For Bergson, the world itself progressively grows and evolves in
an organismic way, so that formal potentialities may be reconceived as
persistent waves passing through maer in negotiation with reality’s virtual
contours rather than eternal Forms given in advance.
Bergson discusses several other dualities intimately related to the
oppositions above – order and disorder, genera and laws, and affirmation
and negation – all eliciting essential nuances, though the third duality is
perhaps the most fundamental for understanding the confusion that has
oen predominated in the verbal construction of philosophical concepts, so
that the ability of consciousness to construct one kind of order as a negation
of another is predicated on the binary foundation of language and
conceptual thought. Bergson reveals that negation itself is really a secondary
reactive affirmation against a primary positive affirmation, an affirmation of
denial, whi rejects the proposition negated in favor of a different, and
apparently incommensurable proposition. However, this differentiation of
the reactive affirmation of negation can be conceptually separated from
positive affirmation, so that any two affirmative positings can be discerned
as complementary aspects of a more expansive whole once the negative,
secondary affirmations have been relegated to their instrumental,
differentiating roles, the negative space that partially constitutes the positive
structures of any given totality.
e traditional metaphysics assumes that the foundation of reality is a
simple, eternal identity given in advance, and that the phenomenal world is
an aenuated degeneration resulting from a negation of this primordial
transcendent unity. However, Bergson argues, if everything is given in
advance, this givenness precludes the freedom of oice aracteristic of
vital becoming. Rather, he describes the world as a virtual potentiality whi
is continually created, affirmed in both its positive vitality and its negative
differentiating capacity, whi is really nothing other than the instrumental
affirmation of a different positive trajectory, so that all positings are
progressive developments of some real aspect of the world’s potentiality,
carried through increasingly expansive domains by the negotiation between
the efficient constraints of the past and the teleologically radiating vectors
whose defining quality is the urge toward future freedom. And thus, the
inhibition of these vital trajectories in the majority of organisms, the
relatively static eddies of all lines apart from the human, constitutes an
affirmation of limit, a relaxation into habitual repetition, an active seling
into basins of araction in a trans-spatial terrain, with the denial and
negation of the vital trajectory as only secondary and derivative additions to
the primary entropic affirmation of maer.
e ideas of exclusion and nonexistence are added to reality rather than
there being a nothingness beneath and prior to existence, as anything that
can be thought exists in some way, even the la or negation of a particular
entity, whi includes the idea of the entity and adds the idea of negation to
it. ere is thus no real absence whi is not in a deeper sense a presence of
la. Every movement of reality is the presence of some affect, some
concept, and thus negation, disorder, emptiness, and la are always
reactive, second-order affirmations, necessary for differentiation, but
ultimately parasitic upon first-order positive affirmations. Negation itself
can be conceived as a formal potentiality, a positing whi Hegel defines as
“the Spirit of the tragic Fate,”20 Selling as Kronos, Nietzse as the “spirit
of gravity,”21 Whitehead as “negative prehensions,” and Jung and Hillman as
the Senex aretype or the alemical nigredo. Negation is an active potency
whose essential aracter is to react against the positive powers of the
maximal absolute, the regal expansiveness of Zeus, the Dionysian will to
power, the creative advance into novelty, and the individuating aretype of
wholeness and the coniunctio. At one level of description, negation is the
mere opposite of affirmation, but at a more profound discursive level,
negation is a secondary degree of affirmation, a modifier aaed to a
primary affirmation, the inimical other. is modification does not signify
the absence of truth, but two propositions dialectically related, the negative
proposition mediating the relation between these differences, and
paradoxically tending toward integration. If this formulation is somewhat
obscure, it is especially in light of the personifying activity of the aretypal
mode of thought that Bergson’s abstract formulations become more distinct.
Finally, Bergson suggests that the metaphysical intuition whi integrates
intelligence and instinct, by bringing conscious aention to affective
knowledge, has the capacity to produce a novel kind of philosophy, a
philosophy whi has become conscious of itself in the process of
overcoming solitary intellectual understanding. Whereas the dominant
modern epistemology has taken physical and astronomical laws as its
primary models in their mathematical, geometrical, and spatial aracter,
this epistemology is inadequate to understanding life, and thus we require a
complementary epistemology that takes the fluid, organismic becoming of
vitality as its primary model. Even a century ago, this metaphysical mode of
thought was beginning to be demanded not only by the inadequacy of our
biological and psyological theories, but also by the novel theories of
mathematical physics centered around Poincaré, Plan, and Einstein’s
innovations, whi efface and dissolve putatively separate particles into a
more fundamental fluid relationality and intermeshing. By anowledging
the validity of various modes for the understanding of a polyvalent reality,
these modes reciprocally li one another in a recursive, spiral movement,
onward, upward, and inward, from whi may emerge a more expansive
mode, a radically novel kind of empiricism that integrates the opposition of
intellect and affect in a complexly contrasting differentiation.
Philosophy’s primary function is to carry us beyond the fixed habits of
any given orthodoxy whi, in the case of the modern epo evidently
drawing to a close, is exemplified in scientific reductionism, but also now in
deconstruction. And in order to accomplish this overcoming, the practice of
philosophy must push the mind in directions that may feel unnatural, and
even painful in relation to its currently conventional cognitive habits, as a
relatively violent heterodoxy is the only way that novel modes of relation
can emerge. However, as Bergson recognizes, su a radical transformation
in our collective modes of relation, from the privileging of intellect to the
intuitive integration of intellectual and instinctive faculties, is a long and
extraordinarily complex process requiring generations of thinkers to
critique, correct, refine, expand, and synthesize novel concepts in verbal
systems sufficiently efficacious to produce an emergent mode of relation.
Bergson describes this emergent mode as “a meanics of transformation,” a
transformational dynamics whi would li the entire process into a more
expansive manifold rather than merely translating from one mode to
another on a restricted plane, though at that moment in 1907, Bergson writes
that “su an integration can be no more than dreamed of.”22 However, over
a century later, the time may have come when we can do more than dream
and, as Bergson suggests, su an integration may eventually even result in
the overcoming of the all-too-human to body forth the emergence of a mode
of a being whi has not yet existed in the history of the Earth.
In a conception that seems to presage the mode of thought enacted in
Derridean deconstruction, Bergson recognizes that the exclusive privileging
of intellect is not capable of overcoming itself by its own means, of thinking
its way beyond thought into the domain of affective intuition. Rather, what
is required is a brave leap into dangerously indiscernible realms beyond the
enclosing horizon of rational givenness, a revolutionary act that cuts the
Gordian knot of exclusive intellect, transgresses the bounds of the vicious
circle of solitary mentality, just as the only way to learn to swim is to
overcome one’s fear of the loss of stability and control in a single, undivided
act, to dive into the novel medium and simply begin to swim, an activity for
whi no amount of theoretical preparation can substitute. In fact, this
metaphor strikingly eoes Hegel in the Encyclopedia Logic, an ironic
resonance given Bergson’s almost complete la of direct engagement with
Hegel, and Bergson’s central influence on Deleuze, who notoriously critiques
Hegel.23 Nevertheless, Bergson invites us to leave the firm, fixed ground of
exclusive rationality and plunge into the vast, fluid ocean of vital movement,
whi may at first be experienced as a frightening and exhilarating
emergence into a radically expanded domain, but whi, with persistence,
may become familiar and even comfortable, a novel, higher kind of common
sense. In retrospect, once one has made the leap into this more expansive
metaphysical domain, intellect is still there in all of its complex
differentiation, ready to explain the dynamic processes whi mediated the
discontinuous emergence, but it cannot accomplish this emergence alone,
requiring an integration of the previously opposed intellectual and
instinctual capacities in a novel mode of relation resonant with an
integration of the inverse movements described by cosmology and
psyology. is mode of relation would enact a radically empirical
prolonging of the brief and relatively unreliable flashes of metaphysical
intuition into a sustained, collective intuitive method from whi may
emerge a more expansive mode that integrates our current, and oen
discordant, modes.
Notes
1. Bergson, Mind, 177.
2. Bergson, Two, 267.
3. See Bergson, Duration.
4. Russell, “Bergson.”
5. Bergson, Evolution, 60.
6. Bergson, Evolution, 167.
7. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 13.
8. Bergson, Mind, 93.
9. Bergson, Evolution, 245.
10. Bergson, Evolution, 290.
11. Deleuze, Two, 157.
12. Bergson, Mind, 162.
13. Bergson, Evolution, 45.
14. Bergson, Matter, 138.
15. Deleuze, Desert, 46.
16. Bergson, Evolution, 272.
17. Hegel, Science, 121.
18. Jenkins, Eros, 6; Shamdasani, Jung, 230n.107.
19. Jung, Civilization, 189.
20. Hegel, Phenomenology, 456.
21. Nietzse, Zarathustra, 29.
22. Bergson, Evolution, 38.
23. Hegel, Encyclopedia, 38, 84.
Chapter 9
e Process of Integration
Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-10

Whitehead only published his first work of philosophy when he was in his
mid-fiies, and by his own account, he had never aended a course on
philosophy until he taught one himself.1 Nevertheless, Stengers speaks for
many readers that Whitehead is “the most unique speculative thinker of the
twentieth century,”2 eoed by Bruno Latour that he is “the greatest
philosopher of the twentieth century,”3 and by Deleuze that “Whitehead is a
great philosopher, one of genius,”4 standing “provisionally as the last great
Anglo-American philosopher before Wigenstein’s disciples spread their
misty confusion, sufficiency, and terror.”5 Whitehead was influenced by
Leibniz, Deleuze observing that Whitehead is the primary successor of
Leibniz who “renews everything”6 in this lineage. However, despite this
superlative praise, Whitehead has had the largest impact in the United States
in the discipline of theology, though his work is now evidently ascendant in
philosophy as well. Whitehead was also deeply influenced by both Bergson
and James, and there is a quality in his writing of subtle wit and modesty
similar to James, though mu of his work is extremely difficult, especially
7
Process and Reality. In fact, among the theorists discussed in the present
book at least, Whitehead’s difficulty may only be mated by that of
Derrida, Hegel, and Deleuze, though Whitehead does not seem to have liked
Hegel mu more than James did, writing “I have never been able to read
Hegel.”8
 Whitehead employs a large system of novel terms to express a view of
reality whose generality had perhaps never before been aieved, though to
orient his readers, he provides a passage whi allows any student of
philosophy to hold the more opaque sections within the frame of the
massive project he calls for, whi he describes as producing a complex
union of the primary premodern cosmology in the West, that of Plato, for
whom the world is an expression of eternal formal potentialities, and in
whi self and world are inextricably and permeably interconnected, and
the Enlightenment cosmology of the seventeenth century, whi finds a
radical separation between mind and world, a world composed of material
particles interacting through impersonal physical forces that eventually
came to supplant the transcendent in an exclusively materialist worldview.9
ese two modes seem to be incommensurable opposites, though if we have
learned anything from the apters above, it is that su oppositions oen
lead toward integration in a more profound conception. And in fact,
although the word integration and its variations have not been especially
emphasized by Whitehead solars, he employs these terms extensively in
this work, so that integration can be understood as a primary Whiteheadian
concept.
For Whitehead, process, the moving totality of everything conceivable, is
composed of prehensions, felt relations between entities at every level of
organization, down to the scale described by quantum physics, where
particles prehend one another, constituting the potentiality for the relational
feelings that emerge in organisms and, finally, in the comprehension of
consciousness. is prehensive relationality is primary, permeating every
scale of process, and both physical reality and conscious experience emerge
from this relationality in whi everything in the universe is ultimately
related to everything else, a further generalization of the relativities of
Galileo and Einstein.10 Prehensions have a tendency to come together in
emergent actual occasions, a process whi Whitehead refers to as
concrescence, the progressive integration of disparate entities into novel
subjective forms, newly unified organisms in the broadest sense of self-
organized entities. Whitehead describes these emergent entities as “real
unities” whi are “more than a mere collective disjunction of component
elements,”11 so that something fundamentally novel is created in the
integrations that produce the successive stages of any process.
Becoming is driven by a teleological urge toward the integration of
disparate elements, lured toward the satisfactions of their subjective aims in
the realization of final causes by means of the composition of these separate
entities in more encompassing unifications, so that entities, in whatever
domain, whi were apparently incommensurable, have a tendency to
integrate into more ordered wholes. is abstract principle is as applicable to
the complexities of philosophical controversy as it is to the emergence of
carbon dioxide from the separate elements of carbon and oxygen. e
disagreements between different sools of thought in philosophy are not
merely two alternative theories about the world, one of whi can be proven
correct and the other refuted. Rather, once a philosophical system has been
thoroughly criticized and differentiated, absorbed into the stable pantheon
of philosophical opinions that constitute the habit of orthodoxy, it will
inevitably come to be seen as not simply true or false, but too limited, not
large enough to encompass the felt reality of process. at whi a system
denies is what ultimately limits its coherence, ignoring or rejecting elements
that are required for a more voluminous holding-together of the
encountered facts. Every philosophy is finally abandoned as a self-contained
and perfect system, but it is absorbed into what comes aer, producing a
reaction, as with the reaction of James to Hegel, but then later finding new
life in an emergent philosophical system whi, through novel concepts
expressed in new language, oen discovers that the older system and the
reaction it impelled are coherent in certain respects at a deeper discursive
level. Like the emergence of novel emical elements out of more basic ones,
or the emergence of novel organisms through both reproduction and
evolution, philosophy is a process of progressive integration of modes of
thought whi, when integrated, contribute to a greater scope of coherence.
As a prominent mathematician, Whitehead understood that the analytic
urge, dominant in Anglophone philosophy for mu of the twentieth
century, to reduce the world to a vast system of logically provable
propositions, while applicable to some limited domains of process, has
tended to preclude a larger coherence that exceeds the possibility of logical
proof. Partially because of his deep familiarity with the subject, he was able
to discern the limits of the mathematical mode of thought, whi his student
and collaborator Bertrand Russell and the analytic philosophy that he
partially founded oen sought to generalize to reality as su, vast domains
of whi are not susceptible to logical formulation.12 One may think of
Hegel’s dialectical logic of becoming, whi seems to constitute a movement
toward the kind of organismic mode of thought Whitehead is calling for,
conceived in correlation with the calculus without being reducible to
mathematics. is resonance makes it all the more striking that Whitehead
claims not to have “been able to read” Hegel, dismissing him mu like his
elder contemporary James did, especially given that Whitehead’s writing is
similar to Hegel’s in its monumental, abstract complexity. With James, one
can see that, although he was an extremely complex and profound thinker,
his writing is more direct and practical, even as it is delightfully poetic and
wiy, so one can understand why he would have found Hegel’s high
abstraction unpalatable. But Whitehead is one of a very few theorists who
might be considered a Hegel for the constructivist stream of twentieth
century philosophy, so it is somewhat puzzling that Whitehead rejected
Hegel so summarily. Perhaps Whitehead simply had not read enough of
Hegel to appreciate how compatible their systems were in certain respects,
having started with Hegel’s mathematical ideas, presumably in The Science
of Logic, whi Whitehead found to be “complete nonsense.”
13 Perhaps

Whitehead was also partially participating in the general reaction against

Hegel’s dominating influence that occurred in the first two-thirds of the
twentieth century, culminating in the general vicinity of Derrida’s and
Deleuze’s sixties texts. Or maybe Whitehead even sensed that, in order to
produce his own vast system, he needed to remain free of the immense
gravitational force of Hegel’s thought. But whatever the reason, it is
tempting, in the twenty-first century, to discern profound connections
between the two philosophers.14
 Regarding the correlation between the calculus and the philosophical
concepts of differentiation and integration, one might suspect that
Whitehead, the mathematician-turned-philosopher, would have led the
arge in the discernment of this resonance. However, in 1911’s An
Introduction to Mathematics, wrien in the midst of the publication of the
three volumes of Principia Mathematica, and nearly a decade before he
began writing philosophy in earnest, Whitehead quips that “the general
effect of the success of the differential calculus was to generate a large
amount of bad philosophy, centering round the idea of the infinitely small,”15
Leibniz’s infinitesimal, Whitehead affirming Berkeley’s dismissal of
infinitesimals as “ghosts of departed quantities,” though even Berkeley later
came to consider them “useful fictions.”16 Whitehead goes so far as to assert
about this correlation between mathematics and metaphysics that “it is a
safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes
with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.”17 In Process and Reality,
Whitehead definitively asserts that “there are no infinitesimals,”18 though as
John W. Lango observes: “In light of more recent developments in
mathematics – in particular, the new infinitesimals of Nonstandard Analysis
– it becomes possible to conceive of actual occasions as infinitesimally
small.”19 Whitehead was expressing the almost universal consensus among
mathematicians during his lifetime, as Abraham Robinson would not prove
the validity of infinitesimals for another half-century in the 1960s.
Nevertheless, as early as 1925, Whitehead seems at least amenable to the
correlation of the calculus and philosophical concepts, writing that

mental cognition is seen as the reflective experience of a totality,

reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit of occurrence. is
unit is the integration of the sum of its partial happenings, but it is not
their numerical aggregate. It has its own unity as an event.20

While remaining distinctly unmisty, this passage appears to suggest a

profound correlation between the integrating quality of a nondifferentiable
cognitive event that emerges from its differentiated parts and the calculus.
 By the time of Process and Reality in 1929, Whitehead is using the word
integration as one of his primary philosophical concepts for the emergent
unity of all kinds of differentiated entities across scale, so while there does
not appear to be a direct retraction of his 1911 dismissal, it seems highly
unlikely that the mathematician-turned-philosopher, extremely rigorous and
careful with language, was using the term integration philosophically
without awareness of its mathematical resonances, whi, in fact, he may
have been intentionally evoking. Perhaps some more direct evidence will
emerge from Whitehead’s Nachlass, recovered in 2019, but for now, the
evidence seems to indicate that Whitehead came to agree with Leibniz,
Hegel, and Bergson about a resonance between mathematical and
metaphysical differentiations and integrations, though his rejection of the
infinitesimal is ironically closest to Hegel.
Like Hegel, Whitehead understood that the truth or falsity of any logical
proposition can only be considered a valid judgment within a certain limited
system, and that beyond that constrained structure, the opposition breaks
down, becoming only partially true, but false in that whi it denies because
it excludes other truths from its domain of coherence. In order to become
more true, a partial truth must be integrated with other truths, whi appear
incommensurable within the frame where the propositions have been
posited. Explicitly referring to Bergson, Whitehead suggests that it is
precisely the role of philosophy to discern the partiality of truths, artificially
separated into impermeable categories, and to resituate them within the
larger context of increasingly expansive generalities in relation to one
another, in whi the truths are no longer mutually exclusive, but
complementary conditions for one another’s specific contours. Propositions
are limited by their relations to their context, and so they contain partial
validity only within a particular kind of ecological order, but they cannot be
complete and comprehensive truths if they do not comprehensively describe
and explain every particular in the universe, so that propositions can only
absorb increasingly broad swaths of that universe into their linguistic
conceptual structures.
 When a mode of thought seles into a metaphysical orthodoxy, the
specific terms and formulations of that system can seem inevitable,
permanent, and complete because they have become something
approximating common sense.21 We have been raised and educated within
the verbal systems of established modes of thought, whatever they may be,
whether Christian solasticism, Enlightenment rationality, Hegelian
idealism, or even poststructuralism, so that we tend to sele into their
verbally constructed assumptions as obvious, given. As Whitehead writes,
“it requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious,”22
in part because words are always inadequate for the full expression of a
proposition, as any uerance inevitably leaves out essential unspoken
elements, including those implicit in the structures of language itself, leaving
loose ends, fissures in the system that render any verbal formulation within
whi the binary logic of truth and falsity can be applied permeable with a
broader domain, so that binary judgment becomes mostly extraneous in the
more expansive context of a greater generality of expression.23
is forward movement of philosophical thought can be conceived as a
vast process of trial-and-error over the course of generations, expressed in
numerous volumes of more-or-less-scintillating prose, and then critiqued
and refined until the truth whi resides at the heart of any plausible mode
of thought is distilled. en it is rejected, rendered obsolete, old-fashioned,
an atavistic remnant, until some new philosopher, a decade, a century, or
even a millennium later, takes the system up again. And though it may no
longer directly address the problems of this new era, this philosopher or
group of philosophers may emphasize some aspect of the system, oen
precisely the aspect that was ignored in that theorist’s or movement’s
heyday, and bring it into relation with other systems, whi the originators
of that system may never have thought compatible but whi, with the
freshness of discovery, can be seen to have something at their cores that
answer one another, that complement one another’s limitations, rendering
them again relevant to the forward thrust of conceptual thought, saving
them by discerning how they are always already integrated on a more
expansive plane.24
 is process of “selective emphasis,”25 critique, rejection, and renewal is
aracteristic of individual consciousness as well as the movements of
collective mentality through the history of philosophy. Just as certain eras
privilege certain kinds of philosophy, so different elements of consciousness
find different emphases at different moments, and even when one mode of
relation is repressed in favor of another in consciousness, collective or
individual, the repressed mode is still an essential part of the mind’s
constitution, and must be taken account of in any coherent conception of
consciousness. e selective emphasis of consciousness is a narrowness
whi allows it to aieve greater depth in whatever domain it is
emphasizing, but philosophy’s primary function is to excavate the univocal
reality whi the particular emphases of consciousness adumbrate or
conceal. For instance, the total experience of an organism is both conceptual
and affective, with the two domains intimately intertwined, but in the
context of the modern Cartesian split between mind and world, whi
includes the body, they must be reconciled in order to produce a more
intricately differentiated totality.
ere is a tendency in process to move from states of disjunction to states
of increasing conjunction, whi produce emergent entities that are more
than merely the sum of their parts. e driving force of this impulsion
toward integration is termed creativity, the creative advance into novelty, a
teleological trajectory toward the concrescent synthesis of previously
disparate elements, whi maintains their differentiation as contrast within
unity, and thus produces a categorically novel kind of entity. For Whitehead,
the most significant type of contrast is that between affirmation and
negation, the binary opposition of truth and falsity, whi, through their
polarized tension, generate emergent integrations. e felt relationalities
that constitute process are teleologically drawn toward successive
integrations, whi mediate concrescence, the progressive coming together
of these prehensions, through distinct phases that trace a trajectory toward
the incorporation of increasing swaths of the world into organismic systems.
Concrescence is not merely a placid unification, but is driven by
engagement with negative prehensions, the felt relations in all domains
whi negate, reject, divide, and ultimately serve the purpose of generating
articulated contrasts within the integral totality, whi maintain their
difference within unity. at whi is excluded from an entity constitutes
the antithesis (a word in whi one may be hard-pressed not to hear an eo
of the dialectic), the negative prehension in relation to whi actual (as
opposed to potential) entities define themselves, as actual entities are always
in relation not only to what they contain, but to the others that delimit the
boundaries of their existence as differentiated individuals. Everything is in
relation to everything else, even if a specific relation is negative in its
current phase of ingression. Eoing Selling and Bergson, Whitehead
suggests that “the negative judgment is the peak of mentality,”26 that the
very mode of intellectual analysis is an essentially negative operation whose
primary function is to differentiate, so that separate entities can find deeper
and wider loci of integration as contrasts within emergent entities rather
than as external, incommensurable differences related to one another only in
the aracter of negative prehensions.
is issue of the negative brings us to “the problem of the solidarity of the
universe”27 referred to in the epigraph above. e traditional categories of
thought are oppositional formulations of subject and object, form and
maer, internal and external, whi have been instrumental in the
differentiation of rational mentality that finds its peak in modernity, but
whi preclude the resolution of these oppositions on the discursive plane
that these binaries constellate, leaving the field of conceptual thought
polarized into a self and world whi are irresolvably separated based on
these oppositional premises. However, the Whiteheadian solution to this
apparently insoluble situation is the concept of prehensions, the felt
relationality of all entities across scale, whose nature is incessantly to
produce concrescent integrations, always to be busily at work effecting the
progressive unification of disparate elements.
e relational feelings forming the entangled roots of process can be
aracterized as vectors, and these vectors are directed in ea phase toward
the unification of all relevant prehensions in an integral satisfaction, the
final differentiated unification of a particular emergent entity in actuality.
Once the unification of a given phase is accomplished, whether at the
physical, emical, biological, psyological, or sociological scales, the
emergent integration becomes an actually existent fact for further
integrations. Whereas before, the novel entity only existed as a formal
potentiality, an eternal object, and as a final cause, the subjective aim or lure
for feeling, once the integral satisfaction of the allied axis of formal-final
causation, potentiality and purpose, has been aieved, the novel entity
becomes an object susceptible to material and efficient causation, for whi
any element not positively contained within the emergent actuality becomes
opposed or excluded as other to its integral subjective unity as negative
prehensions. Both physical reality and given orthodoxy, philosophical or
otherwise, are the domains of reality susceptible to explanation in terms of
efficient causation. But for the aspects of process that exceed physicality or
orthodoxy, whether the formal relations from whi physical reality
emerges described at the limits of twentieth century physics or the
transformative ruptures and dynamic, heterodox trajectories that animate
cultural development, “we require explanation by ‘final cause,’ ”28 as efficient
causation alone is insufficient to explain the organismic movements of
process.
Final causation has oen been rejected in modernity, partly because of its
extreme overemphasis in the Middle Ages in the Christian West, whi
impelled a reaction (I am tempted to call it dialectical despite Whitehead’s
imagined protestations) that produced a compensatory overemphasis of
efficient causation in the modern scientific mentality. ese successive
privilegings of opposed kinds of causation may now enable the discernment
of efficient and final causation as deeply intertwined and mutually
complementary modes of relation, returned to the balance they enjoyed in
ancient thought, but differentiated by means of their sequential historical
dominance. All actualities, from the smallest elements of microphysics to the
human organism and the cosmos itself, exhibit both physicality and
mentality, so that even the atoms and quarks whi emerge from yet deeper
relations are not only physical objects, as they are generally conceived by
modern science, but contain, and are contained within, the duality of
interiority and exteriority that has reaed its current peak of intensity in
the human bipolarity of mind and body. e teleological process that lures
the creative trajectory toward novelty is produced by an integration of
physicality and mentality that Whitehead describes as self-formation, whi
is again a remarkably similar conception to the self-positing of the dialectic.
Mentality is the pole where this integration of opposed modes of causation
takes place by means of aention to both conceptual and bodily experience,
an integration resonant with Bergsonian intuition.
e teleological emergence of novelty, whi Whitehead describes as “the
primary meaning of ‘life,’ ”29 is mediated through the concrescent integration
of the felt prehensions that constitute the world, contrary to Kant’s
supposition that the subject is prior to the world, the subjectivity from
whi that world emerges.30 Ea integration is constituted in more
expansive contrasts, differences arrayed in positive relation within a unified
entity as “the assemblage of a multiplicity of lower contrasts,”31 a phrase
reminiscent of both Bergson and Deleuze. e different bodily elements
form a relational multiplicity from whi emerges a “harmony of
contrasts,”32 and for Whitehead, this harmony is oen constituted in
oppositions, whose inhibiting relations to one another in the lower contrasts
aracteristic of negative prehensions are integrated by their transmutation
into oppositional contrast whi, instead of merely negating one another,
become positive, complementary elements constituting a more
comprehensive whole, lured by final causation, in whi integral entities
form constitutive elements in novel organismic syntheses of felt relations.33
Positive contrast, the relation of difference within unity, elicits the depths
of experience, constituting the finely differentiated precision whi depth
requires, as the relatively undifferentiated structures of contrast in less-
integrated multiplicities allow only for blunt instruments in whi every
entity is interpreted as a nail, hammering experience in every domain into
the Procrustean bed of a more simplistic (though not necessarily simpler)
and less-refined relational mode. So, while the higher contrasts produce a
broader integration of difference within unity, this width depends upon a
fineness of relational organization, as a grand cathedral, the dome of St.
Peter’s Basilica for instance, contains a vast negative space within its sacred
enclosure constituted by the intricate balance of its aritectural structure,
while a building supported by a mu more basic structure can only grow so
large before it collapses under its own weight. e emergence of highly
integrated entities thus requires not only an encompassing broadness, but
also a concomitant structural refinement whi consistently mirrors its
magnitude.
Whitehead suggests that this paern of contrasts is established in the
relation not only, or even primarily, of physical elements, but of eternal
objects, the formal potentialities and constraints that inform reality’s
relational texture, of whi every actuality is an expression. As he modestly
writes in a 1936 leer to Charles Hartshorne,

there is one point as to whi you – and everyone – misconstrue me –

obviously my usual faults of exposition are to blame. I mean my
doctrine of eternal objects. It is a first endeavor to get beyond the
absurd simple-mindedness of the traditional treatment of Universals,

whi Whitehead refers to as “the root of all evils.” As he explains, the

“relational essence” of ea eternal object “involves its (potential)
interconnections with all other eternal objects.”34 Every realization of an
eternal object in actuality is a further expression of that formal potentiality
in relation to other eternal objects, and this increasingly intricate web of
complementary, contrasting formal relations, embodied in felt prehensions,
both produces and is produced by the integration of contraries and
differences in the satisfaction of a subjective aim. Eternal objects are
teleologically lured toward progressive integration, the enfolding of
increasing numbers of eternal objects into a balanced and complex unity
constituted in increasingly involuted layers of complementary contrasts, in
whi ea contrast is conserved as the exquisitely defined negative space
within a network of partially actualized relational potentialities. And it is
only in a late phase of this series of integrations that consciousness emerges,
derived from the felt relations that constitute the experiential quality of
reality, whi, in its enfolding of complexity, is also a simplification, a higher
unification from whi complexity can be derived.
Consciousness is a late stage in a series of distinct phases of concrescence
that emerges through the complexly differentiated integrations of previous
epoal durations, whi implicitly contain the potential for the later stages
of ingression, so that electrons exhibit the relationality whi is a
precondition for the emergence of life and consciousness, whi is the
product of an integration of relational modes aracteristic of physicality
and mentality. And when a novel phase of process emerges from the
integration of apparently incommensurable entities, it still contains the
differentiated entities as essential and contrasting elements of its
constitution. When su an emergent integration occurs, the entities or
modes, whi were previously only related by virtue of negative
prehensions, as external relations of felt difference, begin to participate in a
mutual unification within an organismic whole, whi contains the
differences as contrasts within its affective totality. is teleological lure
toward contrasting unification is the purpose of the creative advance whi,
through successive integrations, produces an increasingly profound affective
intensity within the organism, a difference within unity that is aracteristic
of the higher phases of ingression, namely human consciousness and
increasingly expansive cultural forms, whi contain wider and more
intricate networks of relational contrasts that constitute both their structural
stability and their animating motivity.
For the later phases of concrescence, specifically those of consciousness,
culture, and philosophy, Whitehead articulates a theory of falsity strikingly
similar to the Hegelian negative. False logical propositions must be accepted
as necessary for the creative advance, as error, the la of conformity of a
premise with the encountered reality, is the force by whi we learn, to the
extent that Whitehead designates errancy as a primary aracteristic of
more complexly differentiated forms of life, not just an incidental mistake
that can be cast aside, but a central driving element of the development of
process toward higher domains of differentiated integration. For Whitehead,
consciousness emerges from a play of affirmation and negation, through the
intimate involvement of this contrasting polarity, a formulation whi is
conceptually resonant with Hegel, though whereas for Hegel, this contrast is
primarily conceptual, one of Whitehead’s great innovations is to resituate
this play of opposites as primarily affective, issuing into both physical and
conceptual feelings.
For instance, as a young deer may be injured aer misjudging its step on
uneven ground due to la of aention, and thus become more careful and
aentive in its future ambulations, so too might a solar, aer having
asserted certain claims about some complex issue, come upon new
information or a novel perspective whi impresses upon them the
realization that their earlier assertion was erroneous due to an
oversimplification, whi allows the solar, perhaps simultaneously both
agrined and illuminated, to deepen their understanding of their subject.
Without these encounters with error, organisms would remain
developmentally static, naïve, and undifferentiated, unable to progress to the
more aentive posture or the more profound comprehension. ese falsities
or errors can be understood as the negative pole in affective oppositions,
whose primary function is to serve as the motive force of teleological
becoming, whi is more accurately described as a lure, an affective pull
toward self-overcoming rather than a push from behind. ese prehended
contraries are the spur to consciousness, the negative other from whi
awareness is forged.35
At every stage of process, once a particular integration has been aieved,
the careful aentiveness of the deer as mu as the nuanced discernment of
the solar, the entity or mode seles into a new orthodoxy, a relatively
stable society of unified, interlaced prehensions defining the limits and
constraints of its current conception of reality, whi even its most radical
speculations cannot cat a glimpse beyond.36 But then we encounter
another problem, another incommensurability, another la of conformity
between our conceptions and the world we face as external, whether
physical, conceptual, or affective, whi demands heterodoxy for continued
vitality, forcing us either to retreat into a calcified shell whi precludes
further development, and possibly even survival, or to engage with the felt
contrariety or disjunction, to dwell with it until some solution emerges that
expands the horizons of our cosmos, both internal and external, and allows
our imaginations to risk further leaps into currently indiscernible zones of
affective union.37
Ea emergent integration in this process of ascendance through wider
generalities is magnetically lured by the desire of organismic process to
bring more and more of reality into its fold, and this is no less true of
philosophy, whose teleological purpose is to enfold every conceptual
complex, however apparently incompatible with one another, into “one
ultimate generalization around whi we must weave our philosophical
system.”38 If two modes of thought seem incommensurable, the most
generative approa is not to oose one system over the other, but to
discern the essential structural contours – oen occluded by harsh
denouncements and fierce defenses, alliances and rivalries, filiations and
animosities – whi inevitably resonate with ea other in some way,
contain some loose ends of partiality and limitation whi not only can be,
but demand to be brought into connection with the opposed mode. But the
task of seeing through the minute controversies, contextual
counterreformations, stubborn incommensurabilities, and personal
grievances is a difficult one, whi can only be accomplished if accompanied
by the at-least-hypothetical supposition that all modes are ultimately
compatible because they all describe the same world and emerge from that
world.39 No mode of thought contains a comprehensive understanding of
reality, but reality is susceptible to every mode of thought that has found
some success, however minor or marginal. Even though a novel mode,
always the product of an emergent integration, is usually associated with
one philosopher or group of philosophers, Deleuze and Guaari’s conceptual
personae, who serve as the symbolic focus and voice of that mode, the
creation of this integral concrescence is ultimately social, the network of
critics and allies, supporters and detractors, solars pursuing parallel or
oblique projects forming the relational totality out of whi this novel
unification emerges. And this sociality is not reserved only for diverse
human consciousnesses, but is relevant down to the microphysical domain,
so that a novel actual entity is only ever produced by the integration of
differences as contrasts within a more encompassing society.40
However, this process of integration is not usually a confluent coming
together in a larger whole, but a difficult labor to birth a novel entity, whi
must be gone through, and the success of whi is not assured, but whi
faces real danger. e aempt to force an integration before its time is due
can impel a miscarriage of that potential emergent actuality, so that the fiery
young radicals, who demand revolution before the time is ripe despite who
is harmed in the process, misread the temporal quality of their moment,
aempting to force the wave rather than ride it. And these angry
revolutionaries are oen the privileged ones whose life jaets keep them
afloat, while the less fortunate are drowned in their wake. is is not to say
that genuine revolutions do not periodically occur, and that anger and
radicality are not oen justified, just that revolutions are always the product
of an active integration, and that su integrations cannot be compelled to
emerge before their time any more than a blossom can be obliged to emerge
from the bud. ey can be cultivated, encouraged, and protected, but not
forced to grow. And as with revolutions, blossoms, or infants, the period of
gestation, the winter of dormancy, ultimately produces a more robust and
durable integration because no entity is purely negative, so the other in
every encounter with opposition not only inhibits, delays, and forges the
development of the primary entity in question, but this negativity is
intimately bound up with the specific contours and limits of that other’s
subjective positing, its partial expression of some aspect of reality that has
been excluded from the actual entity whi encounters it, an encounter that
serves to broaden and deepen the initial entity.41
Whereas the typical modern philosophical conception of propositions is
that they are claims that must either be true or false, the eternal objects from
whi they derive contain in potentia both the truth and falsity of every
possible proposition derived from them within their relational totality,
though they are undifferentiated in themselves, and can only become
differentiated through the development of novel propositions.42 While at one
stage of development, two concepts or entities may seem incommensurable
with one another, for instance the Cartesian mind-body dualism, the
creative advance lures a new and deeper proposition from this apparently
irresolvable duality whi redefines them as a contrast within a broader
unity. is emergent unity itself then becomes an element in an even wider
incommensurability that requires integration, whi can only be aieved
through generations writing countless texts, relentlessly subjecting the
opposition to sustained contemplation within the fluctuating vicissitudes of
their affective experience, testing the limits of the concepts through
expression aer expression, one philosopher describing the work of another
philosopher, synthesizing some essential insight from that theorist with
another theorist’s concept, whi the conventional doxa, and perhaps even
the philosopher themself, deems incompatible. e apparently irreconcilable
concepts are rarefied in the alemical alembic of the philosopher’s
embodied, durational ruminations, embedded in the encompassing
organismic whole of the philosophical community (though organisms at all
scales can be healthy or si), whi elevates certain problems and their
solutions by selective emphasis, by collective aention given to a particular
sool of thought exemplified by one or several individual theorists. ese
conceptual personae become the locus of integration for the novel
proposition, whi saves the constituent propositions from their “mere
multiplicity,” and thus mediates the creative advance toward increasing
propositional unity “in the transcendent future,” though for Whitehead,
transcendence is not located with the eternal objects, as they were for the
Platonic Forms, but in creative activity lured by an always-receding horizon
toward whi the teleological concrescence draws those potentialities
through periodic self-overcomings mediated through integration.43
e widest generality of this process of concrescence, whi proceeds
through relatively discontinuous emergent integrations of prehensive felt
relations, and whi is teleologically lured toward integral satisfaction by
the urge of being toward the creative advance into novelty, is the
progression through distinct historical and cosmological epos. Ea epo
becomes a constitutive element of the subsequent epos, “whi transcend
it and include it” as an integral part of the more expansive organismic
whole. And in this subsumption, the earlier epo is never simply rejected,
but reframed, decentered, devoured, and reconstituted as one aspect of a
new unity with a broader balance and a deeper center of gravity.44 Even
when two theorists, or the modes of thought they exemplify and express at
their deepest registers, seem fundamentally incompatible, the affective
relations whi form the texture of a mode of thought, the aitude,
orientation, posture, shading, and emphasis behind or beneath the words
employed asymptotically to express that mode, are ultimately “compatible
for integration”45 in a later, higher, wider phase of concrescence, becoming
complementary contrasts rather than fixed, static incommensurabilities.
Whitehead emphasizes that the kind of philosophy aracteristic of the
modern epo has been “deficient in its neglect of bodily reference,”46
privileging oppositional rationality over the affective modes in whi these
oppositions are dissolved and integrated, because they are ingressions of
coexisting eternal objects, felt expressions of formal potentialities for whi
words, and the conceptual thought they mediate, play an analogous role to
the integral calculus. e felt continuity of bodily experience is
differentiated into discrete units whose summation (in both senses of the
term: adding together and summarizing) describes the originary totality, but
can never become identical with it. Paradoxically though, the verbal
expression of felt experience serves to integrate the pervasive modern
duality of mind and world by leading the mind, whi generally operates
through concepts, to direct its aention toward the body, whi is in
constant negotiation with physical reality, shiing the emphasis from
subject encountering object as a separate, pure externality, to aention to
the permeability of interiority and exteriority, whi find their primary
locus of encounter in the body. e mind-body problem is only a problem if
a mode of thought asserts, oen unconsciously, the primacy of mind over
body as a first principle, motivated ironically not by logical considerations,
but by affective ones, whi Whitehead calls conceptual feelings, eoing
James’ pragmatic theory of temperament, aracteristic of different
philosophical and historical eras as mu as different philosophical
individuals. Whitehead deems the modern Cartesian dualism a profound
and temporarily necessary error, whi can be overcome by the aention to
felt reality, largely initiated by Spinoza, revealing conceptual thought
ultimately to be a kind of bodily feeling, an integration of physical and
conceptual prehensions that Whitehead explicitly relates to Bergson’s
intuitive method.
is reframing of mind and body as primarily two affective modes rather
than as two fundamentally incommensurable substances renders it possible
to think their individuated reintegration aer the instrumental separation
aracteristic of the Cartesian dualism dominant in the modern epo, so
that final causation lures the integration of physical and conceptual feelings,
whi are defined by their relations to temporality. e physical feelings are
temporal, while the conceptual feelings that constitute mind are
transtemporal in the sense that, while physicality is closely connected to the
linear temporality of efficient causation in whi ea moment is
determined by the state of the previous moment, mentality is free to roam
from the past of memory to the future of anticipation, and is only
intermiently required to aend to the present. It is in the consciousness
aracteristic of conceptual feeling that one can, if one is sufficiently
aentive, discern internal resonances among moments separated in external
physical time, durations interiorly connected by their mutual expressions of
eternal objects, whi are themselves the relational potentialities and
constraints of process, lured toward their emergent elaboration by the
teleological urge toward novelty.
e phases of ingression through whi process advances are not
contained within the linear succession aracteristic of physical temporality.
Rather, for Whitehead’s “epoal theory of time,”47 discontinuous phases, at
whatever scale of process, from the growth of an organism through distinct
developmental stages, to the historical development through distinct cultural
modes, and even to the dimensional constructions of space and time in
different cosmic epos, are primary, and the temporality aracteristic of
efficient causation is reductively extracted from these phases. As witnessed
in the various relations among the theorists discussed in these pages, an
earlier thinker can express a mode of thought that is developmentally
subsequent, containing a wider unity of integrated contrasts than the later
thinker, though this later theorist can reciprocally bring finer nuance and
subtle contrast to the developmentally earlier mode, whi creates the
conditions in whi the mode of thought expressed by the earlier, but
developmentally subsequent, theorist can find a wider locus of effectuation.
For instance, although Whitehead is prior to Derrida, it may be suggested
that his mode of thought is developmentally more mature, though Derrida’s
undeniable brilliance lies in expressing the deconstructive mode in su an
aesthetically and conceptually sophisticated way that it could become a
dominant force in academia, while Whitehead’s thought remains relatively
marginal, though deeply erished in certain sectors. It seems that our task
is to bring the, in some ways, more profound, but less efficaciously
formulated, modes of earlier theorists like Whitehead into intimate relation
with later, more narrowly focused, but also more culturally dominant
thinkers like Derrida, a task for whi Deleuze is especially helpful.
Historical time traces the collective emphasis of different modes of
thought whi are oen expressed nonlinearly, complexly repeating through
intertwining cycles at different orders of successive expression. us, it may
be necessary to refer ba to broadly constructivist theorists like Whitehead,
James, and Bergson to discover a mode of thought whi allows us to go
beyond the deconstructive mode so completely and finally expressed by
Derrida, a novel mode whi has not yet been embraced on the widest scale
of intellectual culture, and thus requires a renewed articulation in
integration with other complementary modes that may allow this novel
mode to find a means of expression through whi it may become primary
within the academy, perhaps even eventually overcoming the continental-
analytic divide. We seem to live in the late stages of deconstruction’s
primacy (though not in Anglophone philosophy), so that even those
participants in Western culture who are not explicitly aware of this mode of
thought, as well as the many who reject it or define themselves against it,
must nevertheless contend with it in some way, fending it off by means of a
mere reassertion of the privileged oppositional rationality it problematizes,
or even bizarrely conflating deconstruction with communism or reactionary
“post-truth” conservatism, rendering it the sophistic scapegoat whi must
be vanquished. In this very specific sense, deconstruction has played a role
for our era analogous to that of Christianity (or more plausibly, given the
scale of influence, Hegelianism) for earlier centuries. And in order to move
beyond deconstruction’s primacy within academia, as we have largely done
with the traditional conception of the Christian God within educated
milieus, deconstruction must be resituated as a valid mode of thought whi
may be employed productively within a more expansive mode, but whi no
longer (ironically, given the decentering project of deconstruction) holds the
discursive center. is resituation is not merely a rejection, an a-
deconstruction parallel to atheism, whi defines itself in opposition to what
it rejects and thus has not yet escaped its gravitational pull, but is rather a
novel mode whi, like the modern era that has decentered God, or post-
Hegelian philosophy whi has decentered the absolute, reframes these
dominant figures as objects of personal oice rather than as normative
groundings for a collective worldview.
e mode of thought whi may subsume deconstruction will not emerge
out of thin air, but will be constituted in a reappropriation and reframing of
previous modes, including deconstruction, in integration with one another
to produce a novel mode, whi will interweave these disparate threads in
novel ways. Perhaps a full emergence of this collectively envisioned mode
will occur within our lifetimes, or perhaps the theorists now working in
these domains will serve as further threads contributing to the contrasting
complexity of a future mode of differentiating integration,48 whi those of
us who care to gaze toward the conceptual horizon can discern as “the faint
discordant light of the dawn of another age.”49 But all of these moments are
necessary, as Whitehead discerns greatness in both those who construct the
vast systems of belief, religious in the broadest sense, that constitute our
worldview, and those like Derrida, “the rebels who destroy su systems,”
only to have their successors find that they have constructed a new religion,
a new orthodoxy that must in turn be dismantled, devoured, and
reconstituted in a novel construction. ese are both essential moments in
the becoming of process, for whi it is equally necessary that “the fairies
dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross,”50 ea in its appropriate epo, that
we collectively traverse the trajectory from an immanent animism through a
transcendent monotheism – between whi generally resides the millennia
of polytheism in the West, and aer whi subsists roughly a half-
millennium of rationalism – as preparation for a novel mode that subsumes
and overcomes all of these moments. us, Whitehead can write on the last
page of his final book:

If you like to phrase it so, philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is

direct insight into depths as yet unspoken. But the purpose of
philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but
by the introduction of novel verbal aracterizations,51

to integrate the epoally differentiated mystical and rational modes, the

animist, polytheist, and monotheist modes, by means of the creation of new
conceptual language. ese epoal modes are partial expressions of a
reality whi exceeds them, a reality whi Whitehead imagines as God’s
loving enfoldment of the world in all its integral multiplicity, though he
explicitly argues against what he terms the fallacy of the traditional
conception of an original, transcendent creator in favor of the aesthetic
coherence of the process of becoming itself, the creative advance into
novelty, and we may discern that other imaginal modes beyond monotheism
are more efficacious for further movement.52
Whitehead allows us to see that the world is radically open, that even our
most fundamental understanding of reality, from our constructions of mind
and body to those of space and time, are local assumptions within a sphere
of comprehension corresponding to the contours of the specific contrasts
that have been integrated within immanent organismic entities, both human
and cultural. ese apparently fundamental conceptions of the world are
ultimately provincial features of the human epo, whi may seem vast in
relation to our individual lives, but whi is relatively restricted measured
on a cosmic scale, and there are barely conceivable domains of reality, just
visible at our horizons of conception, whi may be very different from our
collective construction of reality, merely one specific construction among an
infinite potentiality of worlds. And even beyond those scarcely imaginable
horizons, there are undoubtedly domains whi exceed our current ability
even to dream.53 As we have begun to see above, time itself is susceptible to
su an analysis, as beyond our local conception of space and time, “entities
with new relationships, unrealized in our experiences and unforeseen by our
imaginations, will make their appearance, introducing into the universe new
types of order,”54 so that, for instance “space might as well have three
hundred and thirty-three dimensions, instead of the modest three
dimensions of our present epo.” e integration of diverse modes of felt
experience within ever-wider contrasts by means of novel conceptual
creation is the dynamic whi allows us to conceive of domains beyond our
contemporary constructions of spacetime and the consciousness that knows
it.55
Notes
1. Price, Dialogues, 322.
2. Stengers, Thinking, 190.
3. Stengers, Thinking, x.
4. Deleuze, “Whitehead.”
5. Delezue, Fold, 76.
6. Deleuze, “Whitehead.”
7. Stengers, Thinking, 112.
8. Whitehead, Essays, 10.
9. Whitehead, Process, xiv.
10. Whitehead, Process, 22. See Noale, Relativity.
11. Whitehead, Process, 229.
12. Whitehead, Process, 8.
13. Whitehead, Essays, 10.
14. See Lucas, Hegel.
15. Whitehead, Mathematics, 108.
16. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Continuity.”
17. Whitehead, Mathematics, 108.
18. Whitehead, Process, 328.
19. Lango, “Actual,” 29.
20. Whitehead, Science, 148–9.
21. Whitehead, Science, 12–13.
22. Whitehead, Science, 4.
23. Whitehead, Process, 11.
24. Whitehead, Process, 14.
25. Whitehead, Process, 15.
26. Whitehead, Process, 5.
27. Whitehead, Process, 56.
28. Whitehead, Process, 104.
29. Whitehead, Process, 102.
30. Whitehead, Process, 88.
31. Whitehead, Process, 95.
32. Whitehead, Process, 109.
33. Whitehead, Process, 232.
34. Whitehead, Alfred, 199.
35. Whitehead, Process, 188.
36. Whitehead, Process, 193.
37. Whitehead, Process, 211.
38. Whitehead, Process, 208.
39. Whitehead, Process, 337.
40. Whitehead, Process, 223.
41. Whitehead, Process, 223.
42. Whitehead, Process, 256.
43. Whitehead, Process, 261, 263.
44. Whitehead, Process, 238.
45. Whitehead, Process, 240.
46. Whitehead, Modes, 153.
47. Whitehead, Modes, 283.
48. Whitehead, Modes, 283.
49. Whitehead, Modes, 339.
50. Whitehead, Modes, 337.
51. Whitehead, Modes, 174.
52. Stengers, Thinking, 220.
53. Whitehead, Process, 342.
54. Whitehead, Process, 288.
55. Whitehead, Process, 289, 350.
Chapter 10
A Widening of Consciousness rough
Integration
C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-11

It may at first seem incongruous to include Jung in a book full of

philosophers (excepting Hillman, and partially James), and Jung himself
denied that he was a philosopher,1 always insisting that he was first and
foremost a physician, having begun his career working with patients at a
psyiatric hospital, and playing a large role in the early development and
promulgation of Freudian psyoanalysis. Nevertheless, as Bergson writes in
a 1922 leer: “I have great respect for the work of Jung, whi isn’t only
interesting for the psyologist and psyopathologist, but also for the
philosopher! It is here that psyoanalysis has found its philosophy.”2 Jung
was perhaps nearly as mu a philosopher as a psyologist,3 becoming
increasingly philosophical over the course of his six decades of writing, and
thus his final full-length monograph, Mysterium Coniunctionis, published in
1956 when he was eighty-one years old, provides our entry into his thought.
e book’s subtitle is “An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of
Psyic Opposites in Alemy,” and this text is a sustained meditation on the
concepts of difference and integration, a distillation of Jung’s mature
psyology and philosophy explicated through an analysis of late medieval
and early modern alemical texts.4 Jung was generally critical of Hegel,5
despite some striking similarities,6 and he was influenced by Selling,
Nietzse, Bergson, and James. As he writes of a conference in 1909, “I spent
two delightful evenings with William James alone and I was tremendously
impressed by the clearness of his mind and the complete absence of
intellectual prejudices,” particularly in relation to parapsyology and the
psyology of religion, whi were their main topics of discussion.7
While Jung was a primary influence for Hillman, it is not clear that
Deleuze was simply and unambiguously a Jungian, though he certainly
engaged with Jung’s work in both affirmative and critical ways, writing in
Difference and Repetition:

Was not one of the most important points of Jung’s theory already to
be found here: the force of “questioning” in the unconscious, the
conception of the unconscious as an unconscious of “problems” and
“tasks”? Drawing out the consequences of this led Jung to the discovery
of a process of differenciation more profound than the resulting
oppositions.8

e concern with problems and integrative differenciation is central to

Deleuze’s project in what many consider his magnum opus, and it is striking
that Deleuze expresses su a strong affinity between his work and that of
Jung, as Jung’s influence on Deleuze has not tended to be emphasized by
solars, though as Frida Beman writes, “Deleuze’s discussions of the
unconscious in Différence et répétition may make more sense when we read
Jung into the equation.”9
ere are several passages in whi Deleuze takes Jung’s side against
Freud, who nominated Jung his “successor and crown prince”10 in 1910, and
then excommunicated him around 1913 for his purported psyoanalytic
heresies. One of the most revealing of these passages by Deleuze is in
L’Abécédaire, recorded in 1988 as part of a long television interview that
would only air aer his death, in whi he discusses “a text that I adore by
Jung” concerning Jung’s dream of descent through successive subterranean
strata, at the deepest layer of whi Jung finds an ossuary, numerous bones
that Freud insists on reducing to the unity of a death wish, as a primary
example of the concepts of multiplicity and assemblage, “a kind of
constructivism”11 whi “keeps very heterogeneous elements together.”12
Deleuze portrays Jung as understanding these concepts, contrary to Freud’s
egregious misunderstanding, an instance that also finds brief mention in A
Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guaari write that “Jung is in any

event profounder than Freud.”13 Although Derrida, in a 2004 lecture,

suggests that “Deleuze laughs at psyoanalysis, to me, sometimes, a lile
too quily,” and he jokes that part of Deleuze’s “absolute originality in
Fren” is “admiring Jung more than Freud,”14 it is Derrida himself who
perhaps laughs too quily in this case given the admiration for Jung
expressed by Bergson, Baelard, and Simondon. Deleuze also makes
affirmative references to Jung in “From Saer-Maso to Masoism,”15
Nietzsche and Philosophy,
16 and Dialogues II,17 and with Guaari in Anti-
18
Oedipus. It even seems possible that Deleuze and Guaari’s concept of the
rhizome is at least partially derived from Jung’s discussion of this concept in
several texts,19 a possibility whi Slavoj Žižek states as fact, but for whi
the evidence is not definitive, though it is highly suggestive. Žižek also
writes that “there is a direct lineage from Jung to Anti-Oedipus,”20 an
insightful observation whi he marshals as a criticism of both Deleuze and
Jung in favor of Freud, though those of us who deeply admire all of these
theorists may reframe it as an endorsement of what Barbara Jenkins
describes as “a nascent ‘Jungian turn’ in Deleuzean and cultural studies.”21
In 1956’s “Bergson’s Concept of Difference,” Deleuze writes that “there are
no accidents in the life of the psye,”22 perhaps implicitly correlating the
nuances of Bergsonian duration with Jungian synronicity, a subtle
correlation whi finds further elaboration in 1966’s Bergsonism and 1983’s
Cinema 1. In 1969’s The Logic of Sense, Deleuze explicitly employs the term
“synronicity,” and significant portions of that book seem to be explorations
of something very mu like Jungian aretypes, a term whi Deleuze
affirmatively employs in 1964’s Proust and Signs,23 as well as the subtle kind
of formal causation aracteristic of the late Jungian conception of
synronicity in other terms. Deleuze indirectly defines synronicity as a
form of resonant correspondence that is not merely a linear logical series
operating in terms of the causes and effects of efficient causation, while
Jung, in the subtitle of Synchronicity, defines it as “an acausal connecting
principle,” having two decades earlier explicitly equated synronicity with
transversality,24 a concept employed by Deleuze and Guaari in both
volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deleuze takes up these definitions
later in The Logic of Sense, in relation to the Stoics and Leibniz, in his
discussion of “alogical incompatibilities and noncausal correspondences,” of
whi he writes that “astrology was perhaps the first important aempt to
establish a theory,” as this ancient mode of thought posits a persistent
formal, as opposed to efficient, causal (or perhaps quasi-causal, or even
acausal) correspondence between the movements of the heavens and events
in the human domain. And similarly, as he writes in a 1970 essay:

In a sense, humankind renews its ties with a destiny that can be read in
the planets and stars. Planetary thought is not unifying: it implies
hidden depths in space, an extension of deep universes,
incommensurate distances and proximities, non-exact numbers, an
essential opening of our system, a whole fiction-philosophy.25

Deleuze and Guaari’s 1975 book, Kafka, differs not only with the
Jungian conception of aretypes, and with Jung’s early method of free
association, at least in relation to Kaa’s work, but with other concepts
Deleuze asserts in both earlier and later texts26 (the symbolic, mythology,
the imagination, phantasms27), so that one must recall that Deleuze, perhaps
especially with the impish Guaari, esewed consistency in favor of
aempts to think in new ways, Deleuze commenting in 1973 that “neither
Guaari nor myself are very aaed to the pursuit or even the coherence of
what we write.”28 But it is significant that these aempts are enacted in
relation to Jung, not in a mere rejection, but in the guise of multiply
affirmed admirers of Jung who critique the precursor that they nevertheless
deem more profound than Freud. is critique is not a mere denouncement,
but rather takes seriously Jung’s concepts, even when Deleuze and Guaari
seem to portray them too narrowly, seeking to go beyond a classic
aretypal conception (a project also undertaken by Hillman, based on
Jung’s later work) by building upon the differentiations this conception
affords, mu as Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, enacts an
overturning of Plato through the appropriation of certain moments in Plato’s
own texts. In fact, it might be suggested that Deleuze’s primary
philosophical allegiance is ultimately to Nietzse because, more than any
other figure before Deleuze, Nietzse was always forging beyond existing
categories of thought to create novel conceptions exceeding any
systematizing enclosures, though neither Nietzse nor Deleuze can be
understood as simply rejecting the past, but rather as pushing the concepts
and language of the past to their limits, willfully transgressing and
dissolving existing boundaries in order to open space for novel conceptions.
But this transgressive dissolution does not require us to reject all previous
categories in favor of the ones that Deleuze, both with and without Guaari,
cavalierly constructs and then oen carelessly casts aside in the very next
book, but rather allows us to employ existing categories and concepts,
including those constructed by Deleuze, with a light, even ironic tou as
pragmatic tools for novel creation, tools whose refinement and extension
these transgressions afford, enabling their employment in the fabrication of
new conceptual tools allowing further creation. e irreverence that Deleuze
directs toward his precursors, undoubtedly including Jung, cuts both ways,
as this irreverence can be directed toward Deleuze himself, whom one can
profoundly admire while cavalierly – though still rigorously – selecting
among his sometimes conflicting and even incoherent conceptions to aieve
the greatest possible efficacy in further aempted creations.
In A Thousand Plateaus, composed over the subsequent decade, the figure
of Professor Challenger – who is apparently an embodiment of the
assemblage of Deleuze and Guaari based on a aracter by Arthur Conan
Doyle – is giving an obscure and difficult lecture whi seems partially
designed to prune ba the audience (and perhaps those reading about this
oddly hallucinatory presentation) to the few steadfast die-hards willing to
expend the extraordinary effort required to comprehend these esoteric
domains, so that “the only ones le were the mathematicians, accustomed to
other follies, along with a few astrologers, araeologists, and scaered
individuals.” In the same book, Deleuze and Guaari describe Jung’s
approa as “integrating” any given animal image found in dream or myth
“into its aretypal series,” though they express dissatisfaction with this
construction, seeking further to deterritorialize Jung’s theory, whi they
clearly find great value in along with the Jungian approa of Baelard in
Lautréamont (about whi Hillman also wrote), and of Simondon in
Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. “We sorcerers,”
they write, can discern that “there is still room for something else,
something more secret, more subterranean” constituted in a becoming
beyond the “progress or regress along a series,” an overcoming whi they
associate with “the whole structuralist critique of the series.” However, later
in the same text, they quote H.P. Lovecra’s evocation of an ascendance
through n-dimensions “up to the dizzy and realess heights of aretypal
infinity” in their description of the “plane of consistency” (as opposed to the
“plane of development”), whi is the locus of becomings “wrien like
sorcerers’ drawings” on that immanent plane, “the ultimate Door providing
a way out” or, alternately, “the gates of the Cosmos.”29
Deleuze and Guaari critique the aretypes as “processes of spiritual
reterritorialization”30 or “intrinsic qualities,” instead advocating a conception
in whi “cosmic forces” or “expressive qualities” (whi are concretely
symbolic,31 and “fictional” like the infinitesimal) are real but nonactual
formal causes aracterized by their function in specific assemblages of
becoming, nomadic paths enacting a vital autonomy for whi particular
effectuations are derivative points, so that the trajectory is primary and the
series derived from it secondary. However, this conception is already
prefigured in the later work of Jung, where he tends to express the
aretypes as cosmic dynamisms rather than as merely intrinsic
psyological categories, as he tended to define them in his earlier work,
though he remained ambivalent about their ontological status.32 Rather than
merely rejecting Jung’s aretypal theory, Deleuze and Guaari, like many
Jungians, can be conceived as having refined that theory, rendering it more
subtle and general by suggesting that the locus of becoming is not found
primarily in the linear, sedentary series of ronological development, but in
temporally nonlinear “transformational series” across orders ascending
through increasing degrees of freedom. ey suggest that the integration of
differentiated n-dimensional aretypal series is the conceptual construction
aracteristic of the infinitesimal version of the integral calculus, and thus
that the differentiating metaphysical integration correlated with the calculus
specifically integrates these nonlinear and nonlocal aretypal series of
diaronic and synronic resonances, an expression intimately coextensive
with the mode of relation aracteristic of Jung’s late expression of
synronicity, approaing the always-receding transcendental aretypal
potencies in their multiplicitous singularity.33
While these discussions of Jung’s work are profound, they require a
Sherlo Holmesian reading of subtle clues to decipher, a recognition that
Deleuze implicitly sanctions, writing that “a book of philosophy should be in
part a very particular species of detective novel,” with hints leading the
reader to revelations of ultimately complex networks of intertwined
relations that were formerly occluded.34 Deleuze, with and without Guaari,
oen only evokes these realms of thought, teasing the reader with references
to Jung and his work in ways that cannot easily be pinned down, that
remain elusive. One suspects the reason for this coyness is that, although
Deleuze clearly found great value in Jung’s work, he also understood that
Jungian thought has enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the main streams
of academia, as Jung brilliantly and profoundly explored domains that were
oen “beyond the scientific pale,”35 as Anthony Stevens writes, for the
dominant spheres of the twentieth century academy. Additionally, as Jon
Mills observes, the fact that Jung has been studied mu less by philosophers
than Freud “may be in part due to the fact that while Freud was intent on
systematizing his theories, Jung was not,” and that “Jung oen disparaged
philosophy in his writing while exalting religion, despite the fact that mu
of his corpus involves direct engagement with ancient, Gnostic, medieval,
modern, Continental, and Eastern philosophical texts.”36 However, this
situation currently bears signs of a rapid shi, and the increased recognition
of Deleuze’s extended, though complex, engagement with Jung may help to
carry the Swiss psyologist from the liminal frontiers of thought, where he
remains the undisputed king, into the central nodes of academic discourse
where Freud has long presided, at least in the humanities. In fact, Deleuze
explores most of the same unarted domains as Jung, though Deleuze’s
writing is so obscure, while still extremely distinct, that only those who are
paying very close aention, and in many cases who are already familiar
with Jungian thought, will discern the deep resonances between these
theorists. One suspects that this was a subtle and purposive strategy by
Deleuze, whi has been extraordinarily efficacious in allowing his work to
occupy a central place in continental thought, while also allowing him to
engage with relatively marginal Jungian concepts, winking at the Jungian
cognoscenti while this aspect of his work generally escapes the notice of
those who unquestioningly accept the overly hasty dismissal of Jung largely
instigated by Freud. Furthermore, Deleuze seems implicitly to have
understood Hillman’s admonition that “Freud and Jung are psyological
masters, not that we may follow them in becoming Freudian and Jungian,
but that we may follow them in becoming psyological,”37 though of course
the same can also be said about following Deleuze and Guaari as
philosophical and psyological masters.
Especially when Jung was writing Mysterium Coniunctionis in the forties
and fiies, relatively lile solarly work had been done on medieval
alemical texts, and Jung’s book is partially an excavation of this
movement countervalent to the dominant Christian solasticism of that era,
as the alemists’ endeavors were largely motivated by a dissatisfaction with
the Christian worldview, though they generally seem to have been sincerely
believing Christians, and Christian elements pervade the alemical texts.
Although alemy has oen been dismissed as a benighted, and even insane
quest to make gold from baser metals serving, at best, as a precursor to the
science of emistry, the more philosophical alemical texts strikingly
presage the concepts of depth psyology, offering a ri and complex
system of symbolic images closer to dream and myth than to the long-
predominant rationalist philosophy of the solastics, and later of the
Enlightenment. Alemy was considered of great value not only by Leibniz
and Newton in the seventeenth century, but by solastics like Albertus
Magnus, Roger Bacon, and St. omas Aquinas in the thirteenth century,
and Jung discerns parallels with the coincidentia oppositorum of Niolas of
Cusa. e Jewish Kabbalah and Arabic thought deeply influenced European
alemy, and there are profound parallels between Western alemy and
Chinese alemy, as well as Taoist, Confucian, Hindu, and Buddhist texts.
Jung quotes the Chinese alemist Wei Po-Yang, who writes, “when the
mind is integral, it will not go astray,”38 an evocation of psyological
integration resonant with the Western alemical tradition. Jung particularly
explicates three alemical texts, by Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth
century, Gerhard Dorn in the sixteenth century, and an anonymous text
from the eighteenth century, all of whi deeply engage with the problem of
opposites. e alemists considered themselves philosophers, and like the
more explicitly philosophical texts discussed in these pages, they oen
employed obscure and esoteric words, pushing language to its limits to
expand the domain of what could be expressed, to open up space for novel
conceptual modes correlated with the emical processes in the alembic.
Mysterium Coniunctionis is not primarily a history of alemy, but an
explication of the profound parallels between the Hermetic tradition and
depth psyology. Jung interprets the alemical texts as he would the
dreams or active imaginations of a patient, though alemy has the
advantage of being not only the product of an individual mind, but a
sustained and involuted tradition contained in numerous texts wrien over
the course of more than a thousand years that expresses the collective
unconscious of the medieval and early modern eras streting beyond
Europe, where alemy was introduced in the twelh century via the
translation of Arabic texts. It is a deep reservoir of those nonrational modes
of thought that require integration with modern rationality, a cornucopia of
grotesque and fantastic speculations that would usually be designated as
merely pathological, but whi serve as salutary and necessary complements
to the dominant privileging of reason, even contained within its medieval
Christian compromise formation. is repression of nonrational modes has
not merely been an error, but a process of differentiation that in some ways
exceeds human volition, that possesses us in its historical unfolding as mu
as we possess it through our verbal concepts, in whi the oppositional
mode of thought increasingly dominant since the axial era39 summoned a
compensatory welling up of the aotic complexity of alemy from the
oceanic collective unconscious, dissolving the dominant logical forms
through fecund paradox and irrepressible metaphorical profusion across
scale. Alemy expresses an oen incoherent confusion experienced
variously as vitally liberating and destructively hostile, whi the alemists
were never able entirely to overcome, but whi their heirs in depth
psyology have been able to carry further, recognizing these nonrational
speculations as empirical psyological facts as real as the facts of physical
science, and with just as real an effect in the world, an insight resonant with
Jamesian pragmatism.
e alemical speculations are a reenactment of a previously dominant
mode largely repressed by the increasing dominance of rationality in whi
the psye is not yet evacuated into the individual human ego, but is
“projectively elicited,”40 to employ Riard Tarnas’ phrase, from the world in
the form of the spirits of nature and of ancestors, intimately encountered in
sorcerous, animistic rites, subsequently divinized in polytheistic
mythologemes, and then rendered conceptual in the Platonic Ideas. e
emical substances that the alemists distilled and combined in the retort
embodied mythically correlated aretypes and their corresponding modes
of interaction, whi the alemists did not possess the conceptual apparatus
to understand as enactments of psyological processes, a conceptual
complex whi would only truly begin to emerge in the nineteenth century,
an emergence for whi the alemical activities of the previous millennium
prepared the way. ese alemical speculations were not merely fanciful
delusions, but a sustained projection of unconscious contents into the
emical processes, eliciting genuine resonances between the physical and
psyological domains. ese domains were largely undifferentiated for the
alemists in a participation mystique, a pervasive correspondence across
orders for whi depth psyology would provide conceptual language
further to differentiate these domains, increasingly concretizing the
integration for whi the alemists sought, embodied in the lapis
philosophorum, the philosopher’s stone, but whi it was not possible for
them to aieve given their conceptual and emical instruments, though
they nevertheless provided the prima materia for the eventual development
of later instruments.
e unconscious emerged coextensively with the ego, as the unified
individuality especially aracteristic of modern subjectivity requires the
repression of the experiential domains in opposition to whi the ego defines
its identity, embodied in the “lower storeys”41 of the araeological descent
of Jung’s dream. e ego, as “Sopenhauerian mirror,”42 is the negative
reflection of the unconscious just as mu as the unconscious is the negative
of egoic consciousness, a duality whi came into actuality with the
dawning ego, along with the domains of reality this differentiation allowed
us to perceive, and whi it is the task of depth psyology to reintegrate
while maintaining differentiated autonomy, but overcoming the exclusive
privileging of egoic consciousness. As egoic rationality was being forged in
the containing structure of Christianity, the ego becoming increasingly
unified in its sustained contemplation of a singular transcendent God and
his laws, the alemists worked in the dirt and darkness of immanence to
maintain a conceptual connection to the intuitive multiplicity of the
imaginal and affective unconscious, finding rational justification in the
speculations of the intellect, always embedded in symbol and metaphor,
preparing the way for the twentieth-century encounter, through the
repetition of aretypal images, of the monocentric mind with that whi
has been repressed in modern thought. Jung did not claim that the concepts
of his psyology were the final word on the alemical speculations or their
intimated integration with rationality but a largely symbolic and
metaphorical foreshadowing of this integration, whi Jung knew those who
came aer him would go beyond, and whi his work would make possible,
an overcoming evidently embodied below in Deleuze and Hillman in very
different, though deeply resonant, ways.
 e alemical activities contained real danger, enacting the confrontation
with the unconscious shadow necessary for the process of individuation
central to Jung’s psyological conception, as becoming conscious of that
whi has been unconscious can release “an avenging deluge”43 of aotic
and destructive forces. ese forces can manifest in the whole range of
psyological disorders and psyoses categorized by modern psyology,
and even physical illnesses in the body, expressing potencies whi require
integration into consciousness if the individual hopes to aain a salubrious
and ethical psyological balance rather than engaging in the many varieties
of self-destructive behavior that humans have devised. e danger of
alemy is closely related to that associated with the use of drugs that
Deleuze and Guaari discuss,44 not in a mere prohibition, but in an
admonition toward caution when engaging with substances that allow the
forces and powers that exceed egoic consciousness to manifest by altering
the speeds of experience. But simply avoiding becoming conscious of the
unconscious in a fearful privileging of rationality and a concomitant
repression of other modes is perhaps even more dangerous than an
intentional encounter with the unconscious, as the repressed contents tend
to emerge in more destructive ways the more vigorously they are repressed.
On a collective scale, for instance, the tragedies of the World Wars were at
least partially the result of the oen exclusivist privileging of rationality in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries over other indispensable modes
of relation. Alemical work also faces the very real danger of being
trivialized and dismissed, one of the primary tactics of exclusivist rationality
for disqualifying and marginalizing those experiential and conceptual
domains that exceed its narrow scope. And it is true that the alemists were
oen confused and incoherent in relation to the dominant Christian and
then rationalist and empiricist modes of thought, as their domain of
exploration was constituted precisely in all of those elements that had been
rejected, “the stone whi the builder refused,”45 in order to construct
modern rationalism. is tunnel vision made possible the great discoveries
and inventions of modernity, whi carried us very far into novel domains,
but its primary efficacy perhaps began to wane around the time of the
Fren Revolution, and it has reaed a peak of tragedy and exhaustion in
the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, despite the many great
scientific and cultural aievements, so that a more expansive and intensive
reintegration of those aspects of consciousness whi have been
instrumentally repressed is required for a novel mode to be born from the
ashes of the modern.
Alemical activity is embodied in a self-heating intimately involved with
the heating of emical substances in the alembic, an internal heat that is
produced through sustained intense introspection and concentration,
enacting a distillation of symbolic, metaphorical, and conceptual elements
corresponding to the distillation of the physical materials. ese physical
and psyological activities were undifferentiated, as the alemists laed
the verbal concepts that would make su a differentiation possible, but
whi the language of depth psyology begins to render thinkable, so that
the generations following Jung could refine these conceptual forms, and
carry them into more intensive and expansive domains of efficacy, whi in
turn may allow further generations to carry these conceptual, imaginal, and
affective differentiations into even more efficacious integrations. e
increasing differentiations of conceptual thought, first in alemy, then in
depth psyology, and then in the emergent mode that increasingly obscures
the distinction between psyology and philosophy, constructs deeper
problems, more subtle and complex questions that demand to be addressed,
by something whi exceeds our egoic consciousness, in the alemical
alembic of the persistent intensive struggle to type novel words on the page
that may bring the increasingly differentiated elements into increasing
resonance and renewal.
Over the course of his long career, Jung said many things about the
aretypes and, as he explicitly anowledged, his articulations of this
concept became more subtle and differentiated over the decades. But he
generally asserted that, as a physician of the mind, he did not discover the
aretypes first as metaphysical entities, but rather extrapolated them from
his empirical resear on images in dream, myth, fantasy, and imagination.
His early expression of the aretypes emerged partially from his
disagreements with Freud, who employed the figures of Oedipus and Eros in
psyoanalysis, but who always insisted on the privileging of rationality and
materialist positivism (despite his interest in telepathy46), whi precluded a
conception of the aretypes as autonomous potencies encountered
variously as spirits, gods, and physical forces. e aretypes are tendencies
toward all kinds of becoming that can only be expressed adequately through
metaphor and symbol, and thus the alemical work, replete with
metaphorical and symbolic speculation, is a ri repository of aretypal
articulations. In his refinement of the aretypes, Jung came to see them not
only as organizing categories of the mind, but as modes of relation that
exceed us, and that are brought into actuality through our constructive
participation in the nodal clusters of potentiality and constraint that they
embody, dynamisms at an ever-receding horizon of conception that elude
the rational categorizations of solitary intellect, and require an imaginal
mode for their elicitation from the cosmic processes out of whi we emerge
as differentiated subjects.47 We constitute the aretypes as mu as they
constitute us, and thus coming to consciousness of aretypal complexes, the
relations between different aretypes that are constellated within us and
through us, enacts a coming to consciousness of Self, the entirety of our
individual becomings that exceed solitary egoic consciousness and are
permeable with the more expansive processes from whi we emerge, like
whirlpools in a stream. rough this process of bringing the unconscious
aretypes into consciousness, the particular complexes we individually
embody are integrated into our conscious conceptions of ourselves, so that
rather than possessing us and acting through us as fate, we constantly
negotiate with the potentialities and constraints of our particular
concrescence to traverse the singular lines of flight, the trajectories of
becoming toward whi the network of aretypal complexes from whi
we construct our individuated identities are teleologically inclined.48
In the process of individuation, these aretypal complexes are generally
encountered first through the projection of the aretypal contents of the
unconscious into the external world, eliciting from our encounters those
domains of process that hold particular libidinal potency for us, so that one
person might constantly be engaged in oppositional, martial conflict, while
another is always yearning for erotic love, and these projectively elicited
aretypal situations complexly intermix and continually shi over time,
passing through relatively continuous durations occasionally punctuated by
relatively discontinuous anges of state. Projection is not only aracteristic
of the work of the alemists and depth psyology, but is the primary
means by whi humans have emerged from less differentiated psyosocial
modes, eliciting mind and agency from the external world, not in a mere
pathetic fallacy, but in a participation mystique for whi agential potencies
are not yet localized. Although the alemists did not possess the language
of depth psyology to describe their work, their manipulations of
substances in the alembic constituted a sustained projection of their
unconscious aretypal complexes into maer, eliciting profound imaginal
evocations of aretypal dynamics, though it required a novel conceptual
apparatus to bring these processes more fully into conscious awareness.
Projection is an activity necessary for the process of individuation,
externalizing the unconscious elements of the Self as other and then
struggling against, identifying with, or desiring the object of projection,
whether human or nonhuman, a process whi, as Sean M. Kelly
demonstrates,49 is closely related to the Hegelian dialectic (despite Jung’s by-
now-familiar critiques of Hegel) in whi the initial thing posited becomes
conscious of itself by becoming other than itself, engaging with itself as
other in various modalities, and then reintegrating this differentiated
awareness within its emergent unity. e integration of egoic consciousness
with the aretypal complexes that are projectively elicited from the other is
constituted in a withdrawal of naïve projection, a shedding of veils of
illusion whi enables the incorporation of the previously unconscious
aretypal contents into conscious awareness, both differentiated in relation
to the internal milieu and to the other into whi they are projected.
Individuation is an oen dangerous and painful process that must
nevertheless be undertaken, allowing the other to subsist as genuinely other
rather than as a figure in one’s waking dream, a differentiation whi is,
paradoxically, the precondition for a mature relationality, not only to other
humans, but to the nonhuman, and to the aretypes themselves.
e aretypal complexes that require integration through projection and
its subsequent withdrawal oen take the form of paradoxes, whi contain
two concepts or principles that seem mutually exclusive but whi are both
valid, a problematic incommensurability luring us toward deeper and more
subtle modes of relation. Paradoxes are a primary locus for the discernment
of domains that exceed our current horizons of conception, and the
alemists dwelled with paradoxes as they peered into the retort, the
substances being distilled and combined embodying the conceptual and
affective interstices expressed by the paradoxical formulations. e
oppositions whi animate paradox are central to the alemical process,
constituted in analysis and synthesis of the numinous substances and the
aretypal figures with whi they correspond, performing the
differentiation of these forces, oen through oppositional conflict issuing
from the aos of the prima materia, and then integrating them in a novel
emergent figure correlated with the novel substance produced in the
alembic. is process is resonant with depth psyology, so that the
hierarical repression of one term in a binary produces neurotic or
psyotic symptoms, whi must be integrated to resolve these disorders,
though complete integration and resolution may be conceived of as an
always-receding horizon. e aretypes themselves are describable as
polarities expressed in both external nature and internal psye, with the
psye itself constituting a secondary polarity of conscious and unconscious.
ese axes of meaning and form can be encountered in direct conflict along
their polarized linearity, but they can also erotically aract one another
along that axis, and combine and interact with other aretypal polarities in
a quaternity consisting of two perpendicular polar axes, like the four
elements, directions, or seasons, providing a primary opening from dualistic
polarity to more complex topological formulations resonant with solving
equations by quadrature in the calculus, expressing solutions in terms of
integrals.50 But it is particularly the tension of opposites whi Jung discerns
as driving the movement toward these more expansively involuted
integrations, the transconscious polarities whi provide the energetic
arge impelling the process of individuation.
Out of these tensions of opposites emerges the alemical coniunctio, a
reconciling third structurally resonant with the Trinity and the dialectic,
serving as an intimation of the overcoming of the dominance of the dualistic
rationality that first emerged in a significant way in the axial era, embodied
in the birth of a son, associated with Christ and the lapis philosophorum,
from the “ymical marriage” of opposites, the “masculine” egoic
consciousness and the “feminine” unconscious. One of the primary
criticisms that has been leveled against Jung is that he tended to essentialize
gender in his evocation of the aretypes, and this criticism is justified.
Although he understood that the qualities traditionally associated with
masculine and feminine in a patriaral culture exist in different
concentrations in both men and women, he tends to over-associate the
masculine with men and the feminine with women, aributing the male
“femininity” oen aracteristic of queer performativity to “the mother-
complex,”51 though elsewhere he recognizes that the diagnosis of
homosexuality as “pathological perversion,” almost exclusively dominant
when he was writing, “is very dubious.”52 While these problematic
tendencies should not be minimized, they have been thoroughly
deconstructed and corrected by feminist theorists like Susan Rowland,
Demaris S. Wehr, and Barbara Jenkins, all of whom argue for Jung’s central
importance for twentieth-century thought despite his problematic
statements, Jenkins suggesting that the aretypal feminine is “associated
with, but not equivalent to, the bodies of women.”53 However, when fully
differentiated from the essentializing of gender, Jung’s explication of the
integration of the alemical duality of the masculine aretype of the Solar
King, correlated with sulfur, and the feminine aretype of the Lunar een,
correlated with salt, in the hermaphroditic figure of Mercurius, associated
with Christ and the lapis, provides an opening not only from essentializing
gender constructions, but from gender binarity and the hegemony of
dualistic constructions in general.
 Jung draws a parallel between the summa medicina, the alemical union
of opposites whi heals both body and spirit, and the freedom from
opposition of the Hindu concept of Nirvana. Alemical thought is
permeated by binary images, and the primary purpose of alemy is, like the
dialectic, to produce an integration of these opposites, whi define one
another and are thus contained within one another, to constitute the
alemical vessel, “the age-old drama of opposites” whi can be traced from
its Heraclitan inception in Western philosophy. While there is an opposition
between conscious and unconscious, corresponding to the figures of Sol and
Luna, the opposites themselves are undifferentiated in the pregnant
unconscious, and rational egoic consciousness tears the aretypal polarities
into dualities, the “method of division” of the Platonic dialectic, in order to
differentiate them, and ultimately to prepare the way for a differentiated
integration. is integration is only possible once the hierarical privileging
aracteristic of binarity has reaed a dangerous and painful crisis, like that
of birth, whi requires the emergence of a novel mode in a death-and-
rebirth ordeal if literal death is to be avoided, produced by a violent return
of the repressed contents of the unconscious. e more vigorously imaginal
fantasies and potent affects are repressed as pathological, the more violent
and destructive the return of the repressed will be, as these images and
fantasies express autonomous aretypal potencies that demand to be
recognized and accepted into the consciousness of an individual or a culture,
where these cosmic forces can be engaged with in a salutary rather than a
destructive way. Whereas the solitary egoic consciousness aracteristic of
the exclusivism of the tertium non datur is barren and desolate, if sustained
aention is given to the unconscious, whi allows its contents to emerge
from the shadow into the bright light of consciousness in the albedo stage of
the alemical process, these unconscious aretypal contents “will fructify
the conscious like a fountain of living water,”54 allowing a novel organismic
entity to emerge from their union in a coincidentia oppositorum.
We all contain all of the aretypes within us in different emphases and
relations, whi shi over time and constitute our becoming, so that the
majority views of our internal assemblages, whether individually or
collectively, tend to repress and vilify the minority views, projecting those
repressed contents into the other, producing an oppositional energetic
potency that impels us eventually to discover that nothing human is alien to
us, and that those things we encounter in the world, even the most
disturbing or heinous, are also at least potentially present in ourselves. is
transparent discernment of our own internal milieu is paradoxical, as by
seeing that the dynamics we encounter are also present, however
infinitesimally, in ourselves, we can withdraw the projection from the other
to see that they are in fact genuinely other, whi does not mean condoning
the disturbing and heinous, or even the merely annoying qualities that we
find in others, but allowing them to exist as themselves rather than as
figures in our dream-world. is differentiation allows us to draw
appropriate boundaries, whi in turn allow us to empathize with or
denounce the other as other rather than because we identify with or against
the other, using the other as a screen for the projection of our own
unconscious aretypal complexes.
Differentiation is thus a precondition for integration, as without this
differentiation of the other as other, the delusional projection serves as a
protective and enclosing barrier that walls us off from actual encounters,
whi is different from the seing of appropriate, but permeable, boundaries
whi enable an individuated relationality, and even intimacy. Withdrawing
projection is an ethical mandate as mu as it is a requirement for
psyological health and maturity. In alemical terms, the repressed
content is sublimated, corresponding to the vaporization of liquid in the
alembical distillation, the shedding of unconscious projection to render the
aretypal complex and its corresponding “arcane substance”55 visible to
conscious awareness, carried from the subterranean darkness into the bright
light through the fiery ordeal of the nigredo, whi melts the disparate,
aretypally correlated substances into a novel unified substance, enacting
the dangerous and transformative descent into the underworld required for
an emergent ascent.
Although the alemists were working toward a deeper understanding of
psyological and cosmic processes, the best alemists were aware that
their work was provisional, a stage in a long endeavor that they would not
complete in their lifetimes, a limitation whi Jung also recognized in depth
psyology, and whi we may recognize in our own philosophical
speculations resonant with these earlier endeavors. In this light, integration
would be constituted not in a utopian or salvific perfection, “an exalted state
of spiritualization,” but in Whitehead’s “slightest ange of tone,” an
asymptotically approaed “approximate completeness,” as Jung writes,
constituted in “a wise self-limitation and modesty.”56 e process of descent
and confrontation with the unconscious forges the individual through
almost unendurable suffering to produce an esoteric knowledge that one can
only aain by going through the kind of ordeal exemplified by the Hermetic
tradition, whi can only be communicated to other brave adepts by
pushing language to its limits. It is only through su sustained, and oen
painful, engagement with the unconscious that one can bring the contents of
the unconscious into consciousness, whi presages the emergence of a
novel mode of relation on a collective scale, birthing into actuality
assemblages whi are still largely only potential, but whi may someday
become a novel kind of common sense.
e anima (or animus), the figure of desire for becoming through
projection of the unconscious, lures the adept into these domains of conflict
and suffering, the promise of an integral satisfaction, syncategorematically
approaed, impelling the initiate to undertake the descent, resonant with
the ordeal of ecstatic animism, on behalf of their culture. In the depths is
encountered a figure that exceeds intellect, the Self whi is paradoxically
the daimonic potency of something beyond egoic individuality, an
embodiment of aretypal forces of transformation that leads through
suffering to wisdom. It is only by means of this encounter, this immensa
meditatio, that the alemists were able to overcome the one-sided certainty
of rational mentality to begin to inhabit a mode of thought that could affirm
sic et non, a yes and no performing an openness to ambiguity and
undecidability whi, aer sustained pressure in the alemical vessel, may
allow an “incommensurable third”57 to emerge. is third is conceivable as
not only the reconciliation of opposites in a return to identity, but as the
integration of a differentiated multiplicity for whi the opposites form an
extreme case, producing the energetic tension required for self-overcoming
and the entrance into more topologically plural and expansive affective and
conceptual domains. is integration is the final stage of the alemical
work, whi would produce the lapis through the union of the individual
with the unus mundus, enacting the immanent integration of the physical
and the psyic expressing transcendental potentiality.
When Deleuze and Guaari write that

the relation between metallurgy and alemy reposes not, as Jung

believed, on the symbolic value of metal and its correspondence with
an organic soul but on the immanent power of corporeality in all
maer, and on the esprit de corps accompanying it,58

they seem to be reading Jung too narrowly. Jung oen gestures toward this
immanent potency of corporeal spirit in the recognition of an intimate
entwining of maer and form, not only as correspondence, but in the
discernment of correspondence as a symptom or surface manifestation of
deeper forces that find both psyic and physical expression, for instance
writing: “e symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they
express its materiality every bit as mu as the structure of the perceiving
consciousness. e symbol is thus a living body, corpus et anima.”59
Although, over the course of his long career, Jung was not always consistent
in the distinction between transcendent and transcendental, he tends in
Mysterium Coniunctionis to articulate a transcendental immanence resonant

with Spinoza and Deleuze.60 He expresses the concept of the aretypes of

the collective unconscious as a transcendental reimagining of the
transcendent Platonic Forms, whi embody the polar potencies and
constraints for becoming that can only be asymptotically approaed at a
horizon, aracterized by “transcendental mystery and paradox,”61 through
the discernment of complex series of diaronic and synronic aretypal
resonances. Immanent entities have a definite actuality, while transcendental
aretypes can only be approaed by means of paradoxical formulations
expressing polar axes of potentiality, a requirement for whi Jung, along
with Pauli in their collaborations and extensive correspondence, discerns a
profound correlation with the concepts of quantum meanics, su as the
wave-particle duality, a paradoxical description for a transcendental
potentiality whi exceeds the current capability of immanent integral
expression. Depth psyology, microphysics, and alemy all explore novel
domains through the sustained contemplation of these paradoxes, whi
suggest a “transcendental baground,”62 the field of a painting fading
toward an always-receding horizon rather than a metaphysical grounding, a
unus mundus or univocal Tao whi is expressible in the polarity of the

psyic and the physical.63 e domains of reality accessible to psyology

and physics exhibit pervasive and intimate dynamic correspondences across
scale as expressions of cosmic forces that exceed this duality.
Jung cautions that the specific contours of our metaphysical conceptions
are contextual human constructions of “transcendental facts,”64 potencies
that cannot be encompassed by the particularity of any actual immanent
expression, whi can only be known through these constructed expressions,
beyond whi they reside at a virtual horizon of pure potentiality. e fact
that these potentialities have been expressed in actuality in very different
ways in different cultures at different times provides evidence for the
multifariousness of these infinite transcendental potencies, whi require
limiting construction in finite actuality to be known at all, but whi are
nevertheless singular, dynamic, numinous powers that can never be known
in their totality. ese powers assert themselves in both psyotic and
mystical experiences, taking forms negotiated in relation with the contextual
particularities of individuals and cultures, though they cannot be reduced to
any particular formulation, whether rational or religious. Although Jung is
not opposed to the word “divine,” he does not find these numinous
experiences to be proof of a “transcendent God,”65 but rather expressions of
transcendental aretypes, for whi a monotheistic God is one particular
construction, an insight that engenders a metaphysical humility reminiscent
of Jamesian radical empiricism. In fact, absolutist metaphysical certainty is
impelled by an unconscious aretypal possession, and thus becoming
conscious of the aretypes that animate any particular event or relation
tends to produce a tolerance for metaphysical ambiguity, engendering the
understanding that one cannot rest on a transcendent metaphysical ground,
but that one has both the privilege and responsibility to decide how one will
construct and enact aretypal potentialities. And this constructivist,
aretypal, transcendental mode of thought can only emerge as the
predominant cultural mode once a critical threshold of individuals who
persistently engage in this mode has been aained, Deleuze and Guaari’s
“new people.”66
e conception of a transcendent God and the ego are two aspects of the
same singular entity, the polar correspondence across scale of the
transcendental imago Dei and the differentiated individual consciousness
forged through the sustained contemplation of a single, central divinity.
While for the Western mind, God and ego have generally been understood
as embodying the extreme opposites of transcendent and immanent, Jung
discerns the Hindu atman as constructing a paradoxical polar identity
between the macrocosmic God and the microcosmic ego, thus allowing the
recognition that consciousness creates the world as mu as the world
conditions consciousness, a cocreative constructivism whi does not deny
divinity, but does not render the divine as hierarically superior to the
individual. Human consciousness is the divine coming to know itself in a
transcendental immanence that may become differentiated from simple
identity to afford a more complex integration whi maintains the contrast
between different processual domains in the emergent conception of the Self,
the aretype of wholeness. Jung discerns this aretype in the Chên-yên
(true man) of Chinese alemy and in the homo totus (whole man) of
Western alemy, a figure of integration common in active imagination and
dreams, whi contains both the conscious ego and the transconscious
aretypes that have been instrumentally repressed into the unconscious and
the body in service to the differentiation of rational autonomy.67 e Self is
the numinous aretype of vital renewal that lures consciousness to
overcome the exclusive dominance of ego by means of paradox into a more
expansive and intensive domain of coherence, variously embodied for the
alemists in the balsam, the quintessence, the panacea, and the philosophic
wine, whi must be experienced to be understood, as the experience of this
integral aretype exceeds pure reason.
Sol, the aurum philosophorum, the gold of the philosophers whi was
oen actually lead, is a primary substance in the alemical work,
embodying the aretype of the solar King, associated with the arcane
substance of sulfur, the active aspect of the hermaphroditic Mercurius-
lapiscorrelated with the daylight, rational, differentiating, judging,
“masculine” consciousness of the Logos. Sol is Adam, the father and son,
God and Christ, “the dragon that begets, reproduces, slays, and devours
itself,”68 the wounded physician who heals themself in order to heal others.
e integration of the putatively transcendent divine and the immanent ego
is embodied in the correspondence between the opposites of the illuminating
solar fire and the foul-smelling earthiness of sulfur, a paradox whi lures
the adept by means of compulsive will toward the Self distilled in the
intense pressure and heat of the psyophysical alembic, acting as both
efficient and final cause of this transformative ordeal. Sulphur is an
ambivalent, “untrustworthy”69 substance serving as both poison and remedy,
like the pharmakon, eliciting the projected shadow so that it can be
integrated in the light of egoic consciousness.
Luna, the Mater Alchimia, is the een, the “feminine” aspect of the
prima materia, the vessel of the alemical magnum opus, the encompassing
womb of the heavens containing the Sun, associated with silver, salt, Eve,
and Mary, mother of Christ. Luna is the nocturnal, thonic, passive, cold
satellite and medium of Sol, the Moon whi reflects the Sun’s light as well
as the star-strewn dome of heaven, and the salty ocean (Sal) whose tides
follow the Moon, corresponding to Eros, the unconscious, the body, the
anima mundi, and the merged relationality of both the lovers and the
mother and ild. is association with the “feminine” Eros as always
passively defined in relation to the “masculine” Logos resides at the root of
logocentric patriary, whi emerged coextensively with rationality, though
the feminist endeavors of the last several centuries, whi have continued to
accelerate over the last half-century or so since Jung wrote Mysterium
Coniunctionis, have largely deconstructed the essentializing identification of
women and the “feminine” and men and the “masculine,” at least in the most
genuinely progressive cultural sectors. It may now perhaps be more
efficacious to think in terms of the solar and lunar aretypes, whi have
been traditionally associated with the sexes, a binary correlation whi we
must continue to problematize, rendering possible an overcoming for whi
the hermaphroditic figure of Mercurius indicates the way, the ild that is
born from the alemical marriage of opposites in the rubedo stage of the
work. e rotundum, the roundness of both Sun and Moon, and of the
pregnant belly of the mother, corresponds to the aretype of wholeness,
though the integration of opposites is not only mediated through a
confluent, erotic araction, a quality associated with the lunar end of the
polarity, but also through an intense struggle between the solar conscious
and lunar unconscious from whi emerges a series of animal aretypes
embodying that whi has been repressed.70
In one text, Mercurius hands the een a “golden cup of Babylon”
containing all of the “animal substances she has to integrate,”71 polarized
animal appetitions first embodied in poisonous, cold-blooded creatures like
the dragon, serpent, scorpion, basilisk, and toad, whi then become warmer
in correspondence with mammals like the lion, bear, wolf, and dog, and
finally begin to overcome duality in the flight of the eagle and raven, and
then in the pair of doves symbolizing the impending marriage of Sol and
Luna. As Baelard observes in Lautréamont, a sorcerous, Jungian work that
bears striking resemblances to the alemical texts, “the air, it seems, is a
region of easy metamorphosis,”72 a more expansive domain mirroring the
depths of the ocean, both mediums allowing more degrees of freedom than
those afforded to earthbound creatures, correlating with the self-overcoming
of topologically constructed binary modes. e solar monar is the
dominant force to whi all must submit, the light whi produces the
shadow, and whi thus requires an overthrowing and a descent into the
nocturnal depths in the form of the royal marriage embodied in the rubedo,
the redness of the fiery oppositional conflict, whi sublimates the noxious,
poisonous, violent, and brutal qualities of the shadow in the progression of
animal becomings, in the heated alembic whi melts the substances in a
novel substance. From this uroboric self-devouring emerges the lapis
philosophorum, an integration for whi the solar lion remains
differentiated, through self-knowledge, as King, and the lunar serpent as
een, enacting the transconscious union of conscious and unconscious. It
is the androgynous Adam from whose rib Eve is created, so that Eve can
subsequently encounter the serpent whi offers her the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil, mythologically marking the Fall from
undifferentiated paradisical unity into the oppositional quality of
consciousness, a hierarical privileging of God, good, and man over Satan,
evil, and woman whi eventually summons forth the avenging deluge of
that whi has been repressed, a process of differentiation and confrontation
whi is necessary for integration. As Jung writes, presciently anticipating
the necessity of moving beyond Deleuze’s partially valid, but paradoxically
oppositional, critique of the oppositional Hegelian dialectic discussed below:
“One is not a number; the first number is two, and with it multiplicity and
reality begin.”73
e lapis, Mercurius, and Christ embody the aretype of wholeness, “a
fabulous entity of cosmic dimensions whi surpasses human
understanding,”74 the Self that emerges from this paradoxical union of
opposites, and that serves as the formal cause and final lure, the Alpha and
Omega, of this movement toward differentiated integrality. Mercurius is
“duplex” because this figure is both the undifferentiated unconscious prima
materia of the aos and the teleological vital impulse and will to power of
the creative advance luring the alemical process toward integral
satisfaction, the Nous to the solar Logos and the lunar Eros. Eoing Plato’s
original spherical being containing three sexes (male-male, female-female,
male-female),75 the androgynous, hermaphroditic Mercurius contains and
fully integrates the qualities of both the solar “masculine” and the lunar
“feminine,” prefiguring the movement in the vanguards of contemporary
culture toward the nonbinary constructions of gender and sexuality.76 Ea
generation is becoming more comfortable with this nonbinarity, to the
extent that the younger generations born around the turn of the twenty-first
century and thereaer oen take this nonbinarity for granted, marking a
relatively rapid, and highly salutary, shi away from patriaral and
logocentric cultural norms. And this nonbinarity is constituted not only in a
constructivism of gender and sexuality, but of the opposition of conscious
and unconscious, so that there is evident a massive upsurge among younger
academics of interest in psyedelics and the occult in its many forms,
whi are precisely practices for bringing the complex contents of the
collective and personal unconscious into sustained relation and integration
with egoic consciousness.
Jung advocates the method of active imagination, closely related to the
alemical method, whi directs concentrated aention to the subtle
fluctuations of dreams, fantasies, moods, and affects, observing the periodic
transformations of consciousness, witnessing and naming the aretypal
complexes that these transformations express in all their multivalence,
learning to enact these always-anging potencies in positive, constructive
ways that do not repress or obstruct their expression, as repression
inevitably produces a destructive return of the repressed. Instead, this
intuitive method intentionally flows with these imaginally and affectively
discerned potentialities, like a skillful surfer riding a wave, or the complex
confluence of several waves. is sustained and careful aention to the
qualitative contours of bodily and imaginal experience has the capacity to
heal the oppositional wound at the heart of a sizophrenic exclusivist
rationality, whi has culminated in modernity, an “affliction of the soul”77
that demands its own overcoming through the integration of nonrational
modes in “the ‘thousand-named’ arcane substance,”78 a pluralist devouring
of the peaco’s flesh to integrate the omnes colores in the lapis, whi
“contains or produces all colours.”79
Ea epo constructs a novel narrative to express the inexhaustible
aretypes, to pursue the horizon where these potencies reside, as in
holographic string theory for whi the entire cosmos is conserved at a
cosmic horizon that always recedes as one approaes it, a correlation
explicated by Timothy Desmond in Psyche and Singularity. Whereas
Christianity was profoundly revolutionary in the early centuries of its
inception when it was one mode among others in the waning years of the
Roman Empire, it inexorably calcified into a stable and inhibiting orthodoxy
over the course of “the long, eventful, and terrible night of the Middle
Ages,”80 as Hegel describes it, perhaps culminating in its efficient phase with
Aquinas, and then requiring a discontinuously novel mode of thought to
emerge with the dual dominance of scientific empiricism and an
increasingly secular rationality in modernity. Science and rationalist
philosophy were similarly vital and creative in their inception, though we
are now evidently embroiled in a further crisis on a more expansive order
requiring the emergence of yet another discontinuous novelty, by whatever
name this emerging epoal narrative construction ultimately comes to be
known. e peak of alemy coincided with the period of transition between
the medieval Christian and the modern scientific eras, so it is no surprise
that there has been a reawakening of interest in alemy and other Hermetic
modes of thought in the last century, especially in relation to Jungian
psyology, an interest whi seems to be reaing a peak of intensity in our
multigenerational moment of apparently critical transition between
historical eras.
Like the animist and Christian ordeals of death and rebirth, as well as
those of mythological figures like Osiris and Dionysus, the alemical
process enacts a death and dismemberment of Sol, the egoic dragon,
embodied in the “physical and moral tortures”81 of the arcane substance in
the retort, the melanolia of the nigredo, in order for the lapis to be born
from the fiery aos. e adept undergoes a Passion parallel to that
undergone by Christ, though differentiated by the immanent materiality of
the transcendental alemical process, a Last Supper in whi the adept
devours their own flesh and drinks the wine of their own blood, like the
uroboros devouring its own tail, enacting a recognition and acceptance of
the other within themself. e katabasis, the descent into the underworld, is
a sacrifice of naïve egoic consciousness by engaging in sustained relation
with the compensatory shadow of the unconscious in order to birth a novel
entity that integrates the constitutive oppositions of medieval consciousness,
whi have only become more extreme, intense, and critical in modernity.
Exclusive egoic consciousness is necessarily delusional, constituted in
simplistic narratives that repress the aspects of the Self that elude and
contradict narrow narrative constructions. e “tarrying with the negative”
aracteristic not only of the Hegelian dialectic, but perhaps especially of
deconstruction, prolongs the brave leap into a void, enacting the death and
putrefaction of the ego, a frightening descent whi constructive modes
generally discern as a dissolution and dismemberment necessary for the
emergence of qualitatively novel modes affirming a decentered ego
permeable with the unconscious and the others whi it previously
repressed.
e nigredo is the suffering and despair of the heroic descent into hell
undergone by alemists and philosophers, both oen known for their
melanoly dispositions because they persistently engage with that whi
exceeds the doxa of their cultures, like shamans and artists performing the
essential function of pushing their minds and bodies to the margins of
acceptable modes of relation to prevent their cultures from seling into
static, rigid orthodoxies by intensively dwelling with paradox to concretize
the emergence of creatively heterodox modes. is aretypal role of the
wounded healer who confronts the oppositional wounding of repression in
the unconscious requires real courage, because the psyic death necessary
for rebirth can easily become real death literalized in the psyological
disorders with whi alemists, philosophers, and artists have notoriously
struggled. e fearsome dragon embodying the unconscious shadow
projected by the exclusively privileged egoic consciousness into the world
must be slain within the alembic of the psye in order to win the “treasure
hard to aain,”82 the conscious integration of the differentiated aretypal
potencies that constitute self and world, whi are intimately, permeably
entwined.
Jung describes the nigredo as a confrontation with evil and sin, embodied
in the figure of the thief in one of the texts, an integral and inevitable
shadow to the light of transcendent divinity embodied in the dove, the
instinctual animality whi manifests in destructive and violent ways when
it is repressed and projected as other. e knowledge of evil as well as good,
figured by Adam and Eve eating the fruit from the garden, is constituted in
the recognition that the facile narrative construction in whi perfect
redemption follows sin obscures the intimate, always-problematic tension of
good and evil, as light cannot exist without shadow. e coming to
consciousness leading to the expulsion from the naïve paradise of
unconscious animality ultimately leads toward an integration of the
hierarically repressed opposites in a more expansive domain of ethical
awareness “beyond good and evil.”83 is mode recognizes that one can
never rest in a one-sided oppositional grounding, but must continue to make
difficult, and oen ambiguously deceptive, oices as long as one lives,
conceiving of these oppositions not only as the projected external spiritual
forces of God and the Devil, but as expressing our internal polar
constitutions permeable with aretypal potencies. In alemy, the unio
mystica, as with the integration of depth psyology, is not a mere triumph
of light over darkness, but a complexly differentiated contrast of light and
shadow birthing the homo totus, forming a bridge between conscious and
unconscious, constructing the laice to behold a more expansive horizon.
Although Jung appreciates the central importance of the reconciling third
of the coniunctio oppositorum for alemy, and for the integration of
unconscious aretypes, he also discerns the importance for both alemy
and depth psyology of the more complex topological formulations
mediated through the quaternity, depicted as two perpendicular polarities in
the form of compass or cross, exemplified in the four seasons, directions,
elements, colors, and stages of the alemical process, providing an opening
from the binarity reconciled by a third entity of the Trinity, whose peak
philosophical expression is the Hegelian dialectic. e primary visual
depiction of the Self is the mandala, found in various cultures and traditions
under different names, as well as in dreams and active imaginations, the
aretype of differentiated integration, the Mercurius quadratus whi
contains a quaternary structure within a radiating circular totality
embodying the process of aaining self-knowledge. e Christian cross
participates in this aretypal potency, with the Trinity of Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit repressing a fourth aretypal function, variously associated
with the Devil, Mary, the feminine, and the projected shadow of the
unconscious other. is fourth function was long contemplated by
Christians, but only officially recognized in 1950 by Pope Pius XII, acceding
to a crescendo of public sentiment, in the dogma of the Assumptio Mariae,
evidently marking a positive inflection of the return of the repressed by
perhaps the primary institution that had perpetrated the long patriaral,
logocentric repression in the West, just a few years aer the peak negative
expression of this return of the repressed in the Holocaust and the
apocalyptic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. e cross embodies the
torturous suffering that is a necessary phase of the processes of both
alemy and individuation, the death of the nigredo required for a rebirth in
the novel emergent mode embodied in the lapis.
e alemical triunity of Sulphur-Mercurius-Sal is also a disguised
quaternity because of the duplex nature of Mercurius, both male and female,
spirit and maer, Christ and the Devil, good and evil, with the second terms
in all of these binaries corresponding to the fourth function, the sine qua
non of the alemical drama. Based on the work of Jolande Jacobi, Jean
Gebser discerns a correlation of the quaternity with the emergence into a
fourth degree of freedom, whi he describes not merely as a fourth
dimension, but as an “amension,”84 a conception resonant with the Axiom of
Maria, for whi the Fourth is a differentiated return to the One, though the
alemists generally considered this “maximal integration” as “reserved for a
distant future.”85 is form of integration is enacted not in the
undifferentiated unconscious, but in the “differentiated totality”86 for whi
the horizon of consciousness is not a simple circle, but a circular mandala
differentiable into the quaternity, a squaring of the circle, and into the
twelve signs and three-hundred sixty degrees of the zodiac, but also
contained in the three-dimensional spherical retort where the lapis is
produced. However, this final effectus “means something more than
integration of the four natures,”87 an eo of Nietzse’s “something higher
than any reconciliation,” an integration that passes through number to a
syncategorematically approaed nondifferentiable horizon beyond number,
an integration toward whi alemy strove, but whose paradoxical
threshold it could not cross, though it created the preconditions for further
psyological and philosophical integrations.
e metaphysical correlate of the mandala is synronicity, a more subtle
revision of formal causation intimately entwined with the transcendental
aretypes, a “connecting principle” that is only “acausal” specifically in
relation to the efficient causation oen exclusively privileged in modernity, a
principle whi Jung affirms he developed partially in relation to the
statistical experiments of J.B. Rhine, discussed at length in Synchronicity
(though he admits that statistical analysis may be inadequate for capturing
the full complexity of this primarily qualitative mode of thought), and whi
he associates with the Tao. Synronicity intimately correlates synronic
and diaronic events that are not directly connected by efficient causation.
For instance, an internal, subjective experience can correlate with a material,
objective event by virtue of their differential expressions of the same
aretypal complex even though there is no linear efficient causal relation,
including certain angular relations of the planets relative to the Earth as
discerned for millennia in many cultures, as well as “the communication of
unconsciouses” discussed by Deleuze and Guaari, a set of
parapsyological phenomena including telepathy, clairvoyance, and
precognition, whi, as they note, has also been of great interest to Spinoza,
James, and Bergson.88 e aretypal cosmological mode of thought89 is
especially entwined with alemy, recognizing the “universal
interrelationship of events”90 exemplified in the condensed Hermetic axiom
“as above, so below,” in Plotinus’ expression “all things are connected,”91 and
in Whitehead’s statement that “every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the
world.”92
e coming to consciousness of the aretypal potencies, in part through
the discernment of their synronistic expressions, is not only a mandate for
individuals, but for the collective, a task especially urgent in our time of
extraordinary crisis, whi contains the potential for literal destruction
through climate ange, the descent into fascism, nuclear war, and global
pandemic, but also the potential for a radical transformation in our
collective mode of relation to the world. is critical transformation
constitutes an expansion of horizons through the integration of both
aracteristically modern and nonmodern modes of relation, Deleuze
resonating with Jung when he writes that “the horizon is inseparable from
crisis.”93 It is as true in our time as it was in Jung’s that the drama of
opposites is being played out, through us, in the pervasive and complex
conflict between the ideologies aracteristic of le and right, a drama
whi is apparently not ultimately leading us toward the triumph of one
ideology over another – though, like Jung, I certainly have mu more
sympathy for le than right – but toward a novel integration of what is
good in both progressive and conservative ideologies – though current
conservatives in the United States and elsewhere have become a caricature
of principled conservatism, almost exclusively expressing its negative
aspects. As Laurie M. Johnson observes, “in a world where no ideological
oice was perfect, Jung was a liberal by default,”94 though he mostly
esewed politics, advocating an integrating psyological balance and the
avoidance of ideological possession, whether on the le or right. Insofar as
any of his views can be described as “conservative,” it is in the classic sense
of this term, rather than the currently prevalent reactionary conservatism,
conserving what is good from the past and not pushing toward a
rationalized ideal of teno-scientific “progress” at any cost. Jung denounced
totalitarianism of all kinds, whether fascist or communist, and his general
orientation was toward a more profound kind of progress, that of
individuation. While one should certainly affirm the compassion, equity, and
social justice emphasized by the le, one might also affirm the ultimately
traditional respect for elders, ancestors, and the spirits of nature
aracteristic of animistic cultures more than modern conservatism, while
rejecting one-sided, mean-spirited cruelty, hatred, and bigotry, a mode of
relation to whi the current right has a special relationship. However,
cruelty and hatred can be encountered at all points on the ideological
spectrum, oen in reaction to the current ideologues on the right, so that
one might remind those on the radical le of Nietzse’s admonition that
“whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one
himself,”95 justifying misogyny, racism, homophobia, and ageism in service
to an all-consuming class war, for instance.96
Political propaganda preys on the mode that forfeits an active and
efficacious critical consciousness in favor of a passive and deficient mythical
projection of the shadow onto the other, allowing brutal totalitarianism to
arise from any ideology that becomes too one-sided, whether the fascism of
the Nazis, the communism of the Soviets, or the extreme form of capitalism
aracteristic of the current Republican party in the United States.97 As
witnessed in the alemical opus and the individuation of depth psyology,
a primary way this oppositional one-sidedness in all its forms can be
overcome is by cultivating consciousness within ourselves of the aretypal
complexes that we encounter in the other, by being willing to sustain the
tension of opposites within our own psyes and bodies rather than
succumbing to the easy seduction of projecting our collective shadow into
the world. is does not mean that we cannot still recognize the shadow in
others, denounce those who promote bigotry and put ildren in cages,
whi is an essential aspect of ethical activity, but that we must withdraw
projection to encounter the other as genuinely other rather than as a figure
in our waking dream, and thus come to understand that projection is a
healthy and necessary activity at less differentiated stages of individual or
cultural development, but that when carried past the duration of its
appropriate efficacy, projection becomes the primary vehicle of destruction
and hatred. Our culture must emerge from its adolescence, in whi it has
necessarily rebelled against the parental modes of nonmodern cultures by
means of the exclusivist privileging of rationality, to integrate the potent
rational capacity differentiated in modernity with affective, intuitive, and
imaginal modes of relation if we hope to overcome the current oppositional
divisions whi agonize us, whi pit le against right, city against country,
young against old.
In fact, although Jung was oen critical of Freud, who badly mistreated
him, Jung nevertheless pays Freud respectful tribute, anowledging that his
old mentor foresaw the darkness and brutality to whi the world would
descend in the World Wars if the shadow in ea of us was not bravely and
relentlessly exposed to the light of consciousness, though Jung knew that
Freud could not go far enough because he equated reason with
consciousness, not recognizing the shadow inherent in the privileging of
reason itself. Our individual and collective task is to become conscious of all
forms of hierarical opposition, even the transitional reversal whi
hierarically privileges heterogenous multiplicity over opposition itself. All
of these relational modes are expressions of aretypal complexes, even
conflict and discord, whi must be intentionally expressed in positive,
constructive ways if their negative, destructive aspects are to be avoided, or
rather overcome as the psyological conflagration, descent, and egoic death
necessary for an ascendant rebirth into a novel mode on a collective scale, as
even the negative itself, the alemical nigredo, is an aretypal potency that
demands to be anowledged and expressed one way or another.98
Notes
1. Cf. Jung, Speaking, 98.
2. Jenkins, Eros, 6; Shamdasani, Jung, 230n.107.
3. See von Franz and Hillman, Lectures, 98.
4. Jung, Mysterium, xiii.
5. Jung, Memories, 69.
6. Kelly, Individuation.
7. Jung, Letters, 530–2. See also Jung, Archetypes, 55.
8. Deleuze, Difference, 317n17.
9. Beman, Deleuze, 23; McMillan, “Jung,” 185.
10. Freud and Jung, Letters, 104.
11. Deleuze and Parnet, L’Abécédaire, 21.
12. Deleuze, Two, 179.
13. Deleuze and Guaari, Thousand, 241.
14. Derrida, “Forgiveness,” 2/11.
15. Deleuze, “Saer-Maso,” 128–30, 132–3.
16. Deleuze, Nietzsche, 116, 212n8.
17. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 80.
18. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 46, 162, 278.
19. Jung, Symbols, xxiv; Jung, Alchemical, 90, 195; Jung, Memories, 4; Main,
McMillan, and Henderson, Jung, 4.
20. Žižek, “Notes,” 662–3.
21. Jenkins, Eros, 5.
22. Deleuze, Desert, 36.
23. Deleuze, Proust, 47, 67.
24. Jung, Visions, 340.
25. Deleuze, Logic, 120, 170–1; McMillan, “Jung,” 190, 193; Deleuze, Desert,
157; Deleuze, Cinema 2, 202.
26. Deleuze, Kafka, 7.
27. See for example Deleuze, Difference, 17, 61, 76, 126.
28. Deleuze, Desert, 278.
29. Deleuze and Guaari, Thousand, 43, 57, 235, 237, 250–1, 333.
30. Deleuze, Kafka, 13.
31. Deleuze, Essays, 48.
32. Tarnas, Cosmos, 57.
33. Deleuze and Guaari, Thousand, 306, 322–3, 380, 398, 420, 507.
34. Deleuze, Difference, xx.
35. Stevens, Jung, 1.
36. Mills, Jung, 1.
37. Hillman, Re-Visioning, xii.
38. Jung, Mysterium, 348.
39. See Jaspers, Origin.
40. Tarnas, Passion, 432.
41. Jung, Mysterium, 212.
42. Jung, Mysterium, 107.
43. Jung, Mysterium, 272.
44. Deleuze and Guaari, Thousand, 282–6.
45. Psalm 118:22.
46. See Josephson-Storm, Myth; Evrard, Massicoe, and Rabeyron, “Freud.”
47. Tarnas, Cosmos, 57.
48. Jung, Archetypes, 4, 161.
49. Kelly, Individuation.
50. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Continuity.”
51. Jung, Memories, 264.
52. Jung, Archetypes, 71.
53. Jenkins, Eros, 5, 7–8; Rowland, Jung; Wehr, Feminism.
54. Jung, Mysterium, 163.
55. Jung, Mysterium, 219.
56. Jung, Mysterium, 428.
57. Jung, Mysterium, 495.
58. Deleuze and Guaari, Thousand, 411.
59. Jung, Archetypes, 173.
60. Main, McMillan, and Henderson, Jung, Deleuze, 10.
61. Jung, Mysterium, 213.
62. Jung, Mysterium, 538.
63. Deleuze, Two, 373.
64. Jung, Mysterium, 548.
65. Jung, Mysterium, 550.
66. Deleuze and Guaari, Philosophy? 101.
67. Jung, Mysterium, 128.
68. Jung, Mysterium, 119.
69. Jung, Mysterium, 126.
70. Deleuze, Two, 356–8; Deleuze, Cinema 2, 11.
71. Jung, Mysterium, 310.
72. Baelard, Lautréamont, 27–8.
73. Jung, Mysterium, 462.
74. Jung, Mysterium, 63.
75. Described by Aristophanes in the Symposium.
76. Deleuze, Two, 77.
77. Jung, Mysterium, 473.
78. Jung, Mysterium, 44.
79. Jung, Mysterium, 286.
80. Hegel, Philosophy, 430.
81. Jung, Mysterium, 349.
82. Jung, Mysterium, 531.
83. Jung, Mysterium, 196.
84. Gebser, Origin, 340.
85. Jung, Mysterium, 196.
86. Jung, Mysterium, 203.
87. Jung, Mysterium, 205.
88. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 278.
89. See Tarnas, Cosmos.
90. Jung, Mysterium, 464.
91. Plotinus, Enneads, 159.
92. Whitehead, Science, 91.
93. Deleuze, Two, 190.
94. Johnson, Ideological, 165.
95. Nietzse, Beyond, 69.
96. Jung, Mysterium, 166; Deleuze, Two, 61.
97. Deleuze, Kafka, 57.
98. Jung, Mysterium, 253, 363.
Chapter 11
Integrating Myth Into the Dialectic
Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-12

Deleuze’s work was not translated and read as widely in the United States
and Great Britain as was the work of Derrida and Foucault in the first few
decades of what has come to be called postmodernism, in part because
Deleuze traveled very lile, whereas Derrida and Foucault both began
teaing in the United States in the mid-sixties, though Deleuze was
considered as important in France as these other two philosophers. In fact,
citations to Deleuze’s work surpassed those to Derrida’s work in 2009,1
evidently marking the moment when interest in Deleuze slightly surpassed
interest in Derrida among academics, though not in Foucault, who
nevertheless commented in 1969 that “perhaps one day this century will be
known as Deleuzean,”2 and thus Žižek could write in 2003, with perhaps
somewhat approximate accuracy, that, “in the past decade, Deleuze emerged
as the central reference of contemporary philosophy,”3 at least in the
continental tradition. Deleuze has come to inhabit a fairly central place in
the American humanities, somewhat ironically given his decentering
project, though not generally in philosophy departments, enacting a role in
continental philosophy comparable, also ironically, to Hegel in the
nineteenth century, so that the ironies and paradoxes seem to proliferate
with Deleuze, qualities that he embraced and exemplified, writing that
“paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.”4 However, whereas like
Hegelian idealism or Jamesian pragmatism, the concept of Derridean
deconstruction has entered common parlance on the widest scale, at least in
simplified or caricatured form, there is no widely agreed upon term to
describe Deleuze’s philosophy other than simply Deleuzean,5 though he
variously called it transcendental empiricism or constructivism. So, despite
his extraordinary popularity among academics, his work remains less
known to the world outside of academia, in part due to his extreme, esoteric
difficulty, though Derrida is similarly difficult, whi has nevertheless not
prevented the concept of deconstruction from being adopted at the largest
scales of culture.
With perhaps excessive modesty, Deleuze would describe Difference and
Repetition, just a few years aer its 1968 publication, as a “heavy going”

book of whi “I like some passages,”6 though as he would anowledge

elsewhere, “it is difficult for an author to reflect on a book wrien several
years ago.”7 While this text is extremely complex, it is entirely brilliant, even
though he suggests that “it was a beginning” of various intertwined lines of
thoughts that would require further development, “an aempt to jolt, set in
motion, something inside me.”8 However, as he would recognize in another
context, “an artist can think that what has been fully aieved is only a step,
forwards or bawards, in relation to a deeper aim.”9 is fully realized work
has certainly been profoundly generative, not only in Deleuze’s later
thought, but in mu subsequent theory, Deleuze writing in 1986 that
“everything I have done since then seems an extension of this book, even the
books Guaari and I wrote together.”10 It is possible that Deleuze’s work
marks the pinnacle of verbal complexity in philosophical thought, but
complexity is not everything, and although Deleuze’s sheer intellectual
potency is perhaps unparalleled, accompanied by an aura of saint-like
gentleness mixed with a misievous transgressivity, there are certain
domains where his concepts become paradoxically problematic, despite his
affirmation of paradox and problem, requiring novel conceptual
differentiations and integrations in order to be overcome. It seems unlikely,
though, that these overcomings will be aieved through a mere increase in
complexity (a recognition toward whi Deleuze gestures11), at least not any
time soon, but through a greater integration with concepts from thinkers
that Deleuze deeply respected and engaged with, but did not explicate as
thoroughly as his Trinity (as Todd May aptly calls it12) of Spinoza, Nietzse,
and Bergson, especially Whitehead and Jung.
As Deleuze does with Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Nietzse, Bergson,
and others, this apter offers a somewhat heterodox reading of Deleuze
himself, as have the apters above to varying extents with other theorists.
And it must be anowledged from the outset that Deleuze implicitly
sanctions this heterodox reading of even his own work, observing: “How
else can one write but of those things whi one doesn’t know, or knows
badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We
write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border whi separates
our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other.”13
Deleuze affirms that philosophy, at least good philosophy, is inherently
speculative, the creation of novel concepts “at the edge of language”14 to
express that whi has not yet been expressed, to think that whi has not
yet been thought in a coherence that exceeds any individual, and that any
great philosopher inevitably provides the tools for their own eventual
overcoming and subsumption in novel modes of relation.
Deleuze was writing Difference and Repetition, as one of his two doctoral
dissertations, leading up to the revolutionary events of May 1968 in Paris, a
time when there was a pervasive international sense that radical rupture
between the old mode and a new one was occurring, and actually perhaps
did occur in its incipience, though the situation turned out to be far more
complex than the student revolutionaries and hippies had imagined as the
sixties turned into the seventies. It might even be suggested that Deleuze
was a bit carried away (along with everyone else) by the sense that a
fundamentally new world was imminent, a sense whi we may still affirm
a half-century later, though in a perhaps somewhat more reserved valence,
so that this work is one of the deepest intellectual expressions of that
cultural moment, though like any great work of philosophy, it is also
untimely, maintaining its primary relevance a half-century on. While
Nietzse presided over the descent of Western culture into the underworld
depths of the unconscious, Deleuze’s expression of what might be described
as a nascent reascent is oen obscure and ambiguous in part because the
time was not yet ripe for a full reascent even when Deleuze was writing. e
descent had to be gone through, and Deleuze occupies the pivotal moment
aer this trajectory reaed its nadir in 1945, and then began the reascent
toward a novel Sellingian positive philosophy in the sixties, a position he
shares with Derrida, in his peak expression of the negative philosophy as a
complement to Deleuze’s positive conceptual creation, in an assemblage as
the two faces of Janus, an ascent that may find a somewhat more direct and
confluent expression in our time several decades into the twenty-first
century, though the path we are collectively constructing as we climb
remains fraught and uneven.15 Similarly to Cisney’s contention that
Deleuze’s philosophy is a positive differential ontology to Derrida’s negative
differential ontology, May asserts that Deleuze embraced ontology while
Derrida and Foucault abandoned it, an abandonment that could perhaps be
described as a negative ontology.16 Despite Deleuze’s great admiration for
these two close contemporaries, especially Foucault with whom he was
friends and about whom he wrote a book aer his death, Deleuze’s
orientation is primarily creative and constructive, as opposed to the
primarily critical and deconstructive orientations of Foucault and Derrida,
though Deleuze was also oen critical, especially in relation to Hegel, and
with Guaari in relation to Freud and capitalism. is fundamental
difference from his primary contemporaries might allow the conceptual
persona of Deleuze to be considered an opening to an emerging mode of
thought aer the “postmodern,” somewhat like Niolas of Cusa served as a
Renaissance opening from medieval solasticism to the modern.17
Hegel and Deleuze
Various prominent philosophers, including Jean Wahl, Judith Butler,
Catherine Malabou, and Žižek, have pushed against Deleuze’s critique of
Hegel, while remaining great admirers of Deleuze’s positive concepts.18
Wahl’s and Malabou’s critiques of Deleuze’s rejection of the Hegelian
dialectic particularly confirm my own reading, and so I will explore these
objections before moving on to the positive content of this apter, Deleuze’s
many essential and profound contributions to a philosophy of differential
integration. Although Hegel’s philosophy has oen been described as
negative because of the importance of the negating moment of the dialectic,
as well as its purported privileging of rationality as discussed above in
relation to Selling, Hegel’s tone and trajectory, and his positing of the
dialectical movement itself, are generally quite affectively positive, Deleuze
himself recognizing more than a decade before Difference and Repetition
that “Hegel never harms a philosopher, he agrees with him in a global sense,
by accounting”19 for him. And while, like Nietzse, Deleuze is a primary
theorist of affirmation, of a positive differential philosophy, he is, also like
Nietzse in relation to many subjects, consistently more affectively
negative about Hegel than Hegel generally is about anything, despite his
affirmation of the negative. I would suggest that Deleuze is right in what he
affirms, whi in part is affirmation itself, but limited in what he denies,
specifically the Hegelian dialectic and, especially, the negative, about whi
Deleuze is strikingly and paradoxically negative.20 While Henry Somers-Hall
aptly recognizes certain “affinities” between the work of Hegel and Deleuze,
he deems their philosophies ultimately “not compatible,”21 a determination I
will push against in the contention that no philosophy is ultimately
incompatible with any other philosophy in what it affirms, but only in what
it denies.
Wahl always expressed great admiration for his former student Deleuze,
who would later write that “apart from Sartre,” during Deleuze’s
apprenticeship in the forties and fiies, “the most important philosopher in
France was Jean Wahl.”22 Nevertheless, Wahl was strongly critical of
Deleuze’s critique of Hegel in Nietzsche and Philosophy, writing in a
generally positive, though ambivalent, review of Deleuze’s 1962 book that
“there is clearly in this author a kind of ressentiment towards Hegelian
philosophy whi sometimes leads him to penetrating insights, but
sometimes it risks leading him astray,” adding that, contrary to Deleuze’s
contention in what is indeed an otherwise brilliant and insightful book,
“Nietzse’s thought is so oen very close, as has frequently been said, to
Hegel’s.” Wahl recognizes that there are numerous passages in Nietzse,
especially in The Birth of Tragedy, but also as late as The Antichrist wrien
in the last years of his sanity, that allowed Heidegger to render Nietzse as
a partially critical heir to Hegel rather than merely as Hegel’s opponent.
Wahl observes that, although Deleuze’s assertion that only affirmation, and
not negation, returns in the eternal return “is ingenious and profound,” Wahl
also recognizes that “it runs up against some profoundly Nietzsean
affirmations, since to affirm a moment of pleasure is to affirm, at the same
time, that totality in whi the depths of pain as mu as the depths of
pleasure are integrated,” a recognition that integral affirmation is not
possible without the affirmation of negation itself, both affective and
conceptual, and thus, Wahl asks, “is there not some dialectic” in both
Nietzse and Deleuze?23 As Cisney observes, despite his sympathy for
Deleuze’s critique of Hegel, “even in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze’s
most ardently anti-Hegelian book, Hegel plays more the role of a foil than
an interlocutor, a aracter against whom Nietzse’s Übermens emerges,
rather than an object of extended critique.”24
However, the relatively mild criticisms of his respected teaer Wahl did
not dissuade Deleuze from extendedly critiquing Hegel six years later in
Difference and Repetition, so that his deepening of the Hegelian dialectic is
sometimes occluded by the scorn Deleuze unaracteristically, and almost
uniquely, directs against the German philosopher. In “Who’s Afraid of
Hegelian Wolves?” Malabou, a Fren philosopher who collaborated with
Derrida, asks
 whether, in the case of Hegel, Deleuze does not in fact repeat the
gesture that he condemns in Freud; whether in Deleuze’s work, as in
Freud’s, one is not faced with this ‘reductive glee’ by means of whi
multiplicity becomes a unity.25

As with the interpretation of Jung’s dream for whi Freud reduces a

multiplicity of bones to a single death wish discussed by Deleuze, Malabou
recognizes that Deleuze reduces Hegel to a caricature, “the abhorred victim
of the pa of the thinkers of difference, their absolute enemy,”26 whom he
can use as a “straw man,”27 as Žižek writes, to define his radically novel
theory. Malabou observes that Hegel plays a singular role in Deleuze’s
thought, serving as “an absolute heteron,”28 the ultimate adversary, “the
accursed exceptional one,” in a way that Deleuze did not approa even with
Kant, whom he strongly critiqued. In his oppositional rejection of Hegel,
Deleuze creates “a blo of becoming called Hegel-Deleuze, as unexpected
yet plausible as that of the wasp and orid”29 discussed in A Thousand
Plateaus, so that “Deleuze never recognizes Hegel as his white whale,
leaving to the reader the task of recognizing in his relentless opposition to
the dialectic the impassioned limping of a Captain Ahab,”30 evoking
Deleuze’s particular fondness for Melville’s novel. As Malabou suggests, this
apparent projection by Deleuze onto Hegel is ripe for psyological analysis,
whi will be undertaken below, though su an analysis is immensely
complicated by Deleuze and Guaari’s own critique of the Oedipal complex.
Nevertheless, rather than asserting a merely incommensurable opposition
between Hegel and Deleuze, a simple binarity that both philosophers played
primary roles in exceeding in the abstract conceptual domain, we might
recognize in Hegel’s extraordinarily complex thought “not an opposition but
an astonishing proximity to that of Deleuze,”31 affirming Hegel’s central role
in Deleuze’s work.
Deleuze overstates his case about Hegel, whose work he nevertheless
respects enough to describe it as “the final and most powerful homage
rendered to the old principle,”32 the reconciliation of opposites in a return to
identity, ultimately derived from Heraclitus and Plato, whi Deleuze
overturns. Deleuze’s innovation that difference is deeper than opposition,
that opposition is a special case of difference, is profound, but his
denouncement of the negative is extremely ironic, as this denouncement is
precisely an enactment of the negative. Deleuze aempts to escape the
negative by inconsistently affirming that “being is full positivity and pure
affirmation,”33 but it is ultimately not possible to escape the negative, as
witnessed in Deleuze’s negation of Hegel, because in order to escape it, one
would have to negate the negative, whi undermines its own project, and
looks remarkably like the dialectic it seeks to reject. However, Deleuze’s
suggestion that the Hegelian dialectic and the negative are second-order
manifestations, as in an illusory “optical ‘effect,’ ”34 of a deeper order of pure
positive difference can be recognized as a pivotal, even epoal,
contribution. Deleuze is right that difference is a more profound domain
than the opposition and sublation of the dialectic, but not that this dialectic
can be completely overcome any more than Newton can be completely
overcome. Newton’s and Hegel’s theories are also epoal, world-
constituting, and even when resituated as special cases within broader or
deeper theories, they are still valid within their domains of applicability. As
Deleuze recognizes, “the constants of one law are in turn variables of a more
general law,”35 the law of the oppositional dialectic reframed as a variable
within a broader domain of difference, a deeper dialectic that Deleuze
constructs especially in relation to certain moments in Plato, the Leibnizian
calculus, Sellingian potencies, and the Nietzsean eternal return.36
Nevertheless, Deleuze apparently wants absolutely to overcome
opposition because opposition resides at the heart of modern rationalism,
and he wants to create something completely new and free from the old
modes and categories of thought, an endeavor in whi he succeeds beyond
all reasonable expectation, though a complete liberation from binarity is
impossible, as binarity is deeply embedded in the structure of language and
the conceptual thought it expresses, and any emergent mode must subsume
the previous verbal and conceptual modes as essential elements in its
constitution in order to surpass them. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and
Guaari explicitly address the necessity of opposition in the process of
conceptual creation, writing: “We employ a dualism of models only in order
to arrive at a process that allenges all models. Ea time, mental
correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no wish to construct
but through whi we pass.”37 Similarly, in Foucault, Deleuze writes that
“multiplicity can be realized and the differential of forces integrated only by
taking diverging paths, spliing into dualisms, and following lines of
differentiation,”38 also writing in Cinema 2 that “it is necessary to make a
division or make emptiness in order to find the whole again,”39 thus
variously anowledging the impossibility of completely overcoming
binarity as an integral aspect of process as he seems to want to do in
Difference and Repetition.
When Deleuze was writing this text, oppositional rationality was still
almost completely dominant, and the spirit of the sixties, perhaps especially
May 1968, the year of its publication, was aracterized by a titanic striving
toward the total freedom from all constraints, the complete abandonment of
the old modes of relation in favor of new ones, though this dream came to
seem naïve just a few years later. Deleuze was very profound and ultimately
sophisticated, but he was also apparently caught up in the spirit of his
moment, as we all are in our moments, so that one of his most important
concepts, the deepening of opposition into difference, is historically
intertwined with his negation of the negative, a paradoxical position, as
perhaps the best mode of thought to explain Deleuze’s relation to Hegel is
precisely the Hegelian dialectic itself, though Deleuze goes beyond Hegel.
Deleuze is not merely Hegelian because he rejected Hegel as his antithesis,
but his relation to Hegel is susceptible to a dialectical mode of thought,
whi explains some aspects of the relation but not others. Deleuze furiously
aempts to think his way beyond the Hegelian dialectic, an endeavor in
whi he is partially successful, but he gloriously fails in completely leaving
the Hegelian dialectic and the negative behind, as his relation to these
concepts is best accounted for by means of these concepts, is susceptible to
their mode of explanation, though, as he so powerfully demonstrates, this
mode is far from exhausting the potential modes of relation. He
spectacularly succeeds in showing that this dialectic is one mode of relation
among others, a special case of a more profound dialectical conception.
e Hegelian dialectic assumes the most extreme case of difference,
though not the greatest, that of opposition, and as Derrida especially
understood, the privileging of rationality is predicated upon this
oppositionality. But Deleuze suggests that the overcoming of the
oppositional metaphysics is not primarily to be found in the reconciling
third of dialectical sublation, whi may be conceived as an initial opening
to a novel mode, so that the dialectic must be placed in the context of a
“more profound game”40 in whi oppositions are shown to be one kind of
differential relation among others, one topological construction in a more
expansive domain of difference whi has been subordinated since at least
Aristotle to the oppositional mediation whi assumes an originary
identity.41 I would suggest that part of the reason why Deleuze’s writing is
so complex, at least as complex as Hegel, Whitehead, and Derrida, is that he
is aempting to express this novel mode beyond the hegemony of opposition
through language permeated by opposition. His writing is an emancipatory
loosening of the categories of thought, not primarily a deconstruction, but a
positive, even poetic expression (though Derrida’s writing is also poetic) of a
novel philosophy that abandons the old certainties in favor of a future mode
that we can scarcely imagine, that it is our task collectively to create. Rather
than a fully elaborated closed system, Deleuze provides aesthetically
profound evocations of the world and the thought to come, a world whi
remains at the horizon of a temporal singularity.
Opposition is an abstractive reduction from multiplicity, the construction
of a binary figure that suppresses the complexity and pluralistic profusion of
the world. Deleuze wants to move beyond opposition, not by reconciling the
opposites in an emergent third entity, but by relegating opposition to the
status of one kind of relation among others. He is aempting to overcome
the traditional categories of philosophical thought grounded in opposition to
think his way into a novel mode not dominated by opposition, that does not
privilege opposition. However, the meta-opposition Deleuze constructs
between opposition and multiplicity can be dissolved and reconstituted in
the recognition that the only way out is through the opposites, but it is also
necessary to produce an expression of what the movement of thought could
look like aer the reign of opposition has ended, to make this end possible
through su an expression. Whereas most of the theorists in the apters
above recognize that there is no geing around the problem of opposites,
that it must be faced, Deleuze, writing at the limits of language, evokes
destinations toward whi thought can move, virtual domains not yet
actualized, lures whi we can employ to pull ourselves beyond our current
constraints. One would certainly hope that some progress would have been
made in philosophy in the century-and-a-half that separates The
Phenomenology of Spirit and Difference and Repetition, and Deleuze
undoubtedly produced a profoundly innovative deepening of Hegel. But
another half-century aer Deleuze’s book, we can perhaps recognize that his
rejection of Hegel was an instrumental necessity in its historical context, for
whi, as Deleuze writes, “perhaps the majority of philosophers had
subordinated difference to identity” and “to the Opposed,”42 but that this
rejection is not what is so creative and novel in Deleuze. Rather, it can be
understood as the paradoxically oppositional tension employed to forge his
theory of difference, not the theory itself, though the theory inevitably
contains the marks and constraints of the instrument employed in its
fabrication.
If we are to follow Deleuze’s exhortation to affirm difference, just as we
followed James’ pragmatism imperfectly practiced in his own relation to
Hegel, we must apply Deleuze’s affirmation to his own theory, whi is
inconsistent in this specific case with what he so brilliantly advocates. If he
were consistent, he would affirm the partial, contingent validity of the
negative, and anowledge that he is being pervasively, sustainedly negative
in relation to the negative itself, a negation of negation whi does not
generate the positive, an insight whi Deleuze recognizes, though he only
intermiently implements this recognition.43 As Deleuze makes it possible
for us to understand, the way to overcome the negative is not merely to
reject it, because the negative absorbs that negativity into its infinite void,
but to affirm the negative as a secondary order of becoming because, as
Hegel writes, “a negative nothing is however something affirmative,”44 a
positive, inescapable aspect of process, so that Deleuze’s differential
innovation would enfold Hegel into Deleuze’s mode of thought without
making Deleuze Hegelian. Deleuze can thus be imagined as something like a
philosophical Einstein relegating Newton to a special case, a diminished role,
though it is as if Einstein spent a great deal of his time denouncing Newton
rather than simply creating his theory on the shoulders of Newton who, like
Hegel, is indeed a giant. So perhaps it is le to our generations, half-a-
century aer Deleuze, to complete his project, to render it more consistent
by removing the arge from the relation to the negative, bringing the
Hegelian dialectic into our mode of thought to serve the integral affirmation
of the full scope of multiplicity rather than merely railing against it, like a
grown son railing against his father, whose gravity he cannot seem to
escape, whom he is more like than he would care to admit, genetically
descended from him despite all his efforts to be absolutely different.
In spite of Deleuze and Guaari’s hugely influential “deconstruction” of
the Oedipal complex, it may be suggested that Deleuze still participates in
this complex in relation to Hegel, so that the rejection of the dialectic and
the rejection of Oedipus are intimately entwined, a relation that Deleuze and
Guaari explicitly anowledge via Foucault.45 As René Girard writes, Anti-
Oedipus is “Oedipal to the core since it is completely structured by a

triangular rivalry with the theorists of psyoanalysis.”46 And, as Deleuze

himself would observe in an essay wrien in 1967, but published in 1972, the
same year as Anti-Oedipus, “no book against anything ever has any
importance; all that counts are books for something, and that know how to
produce it,”47 an ironic coincidence given that Deleuze’s most popular book
is precisely a book against the Oedipal, at least according to its title, though
it is also for other profound concepts like the axiomatics and, especially,
sizoanalysis, producing a more differentiated integration of philosophy
and psyology. However, as Deleuze and Guaari would write three years
later about Kaa, in a passage that may be read as a defense against the
kind of critique leveled by Girard, their project is not merely to reject
Oedipus, but “to augment and expand Oedipus by adding to it and making a
paranoid and perverse use of it” in order “to escape from submission.”48
In a 1973 interview, Deleuze asserts that he is more oriented toward the
rejection or overcoming of “Oedipal filth” than Guaari, who prefers an
Oedipal accelerationism like the one described in Kafka, for whi “the
more Oedipal you are, the beer it will be,” though Deleuze anowledges
the mutual truth of their differing conceptions, whi remain
undifferentiated – or perhaps integrated – in their cowrien texts.49 And
although they recognize in 1987 that “Anti-Oedipus was a big success,” they
also admit that “this success was accompanied by a more fundamental
failure,” as their “dream was to put Oedipus to rest once and for all. But the
job was too big for us,” and “Oedipus has become our albatross.”50 In Kafka,
Deleuze and Guaari recognize that “there is always the danger of the
return of Oedipal force,” as “the amplifying perverse usage of Oedipus is not
sufficient to guard against every new closure,”51 and thus the strategic
acceleration of the Oedipal especially advocated by Guaari, intimately
entwined with the accelerations of capitalism and sizophrenia, evinces a
limited efficacy, and cannot constitute the final escape of an absolute
deterritorialization, an activity whi is not always positive, Deleuze for
instance describing the Crusades as a deterritorialization.52 As they write in
What Is Philosophy?: “Movements of deterritorialization are inseparable
from territories that open onto an elsewhere; and the process of
reterritorialization is inseparable from the earth, whi restores territories,”53
even the territories of the Oedipal and the dialectic themselves, whi
Deleuzoguaarian deterritorializations allow to be resituated within more
expansive territories.
Like Nietzse’s denouncement of ressentiment, then, rather than being
refuted by these complex ironies and paradoxes, the profound novelty of
Deleuze and Guaari’s work is made possible by Deleuze’s evidently
Oedipal complex, whi is clear from reading his biography. And although
Beman, in her biography of Deleuze, is less sympathetic to an Oedipal
reading than Francois Dosse in his comprehensive dual biography of
Deleuze and Guaari, Beman nevertheless cites Derrida’s rejection of
Heidegger’s dismissal of the significance of Aristotle’s biography in reading
the work of the ancient philosopher, Derrida suggesting that biography
should be brought “ba into the picture,”54 a suggestion taken up below.
Deleuze himself anowledges the importance of biography in 1953’s
Empiricism and Subjectivity, writing that “certainly, we know that a
philosophical theory involves psyological and, above all, sociological
factors,”55 whi motivate philosophical questions, similarly affirming, in
1982, “what Nietzse says on the importance of ‘anecdotes’ fiing ‘thought,
in the life of a thinker.’ ”56 In What Is Grounding?, Deleuze offers an
evidently Oedipal reading of Kierkegaard, whose relationship with his father
is “a secret in his life whi suffocates him,”57 and he makes a similarly
biographical observation with his wife, Fanny Deleuze, about D. H.
Lawrence in 1978.58
No maer how strenuously the Promethean radical Deleuze, now steadily
becoming a traditional ancestor figure, rejected the older metaphysics,
exemplified in the saturnine father-figure of Hegel, he could not ultimately
escape the pull of Hegel’s gravity because, as a son inescapably resembles
his father, even if the son adopts a completely different style of dress and
mode of thought, the conceptual persona of Deleuze differentially repeats
the conceptual persona of Hegel. In fact, Deleuze is perhaps the single
philosopher who possesses the greatest claim to playing a role in the early
twenty-first century parallel to Hegel’s in the nineteenth century, the
conceptual persona fulfilling the function of the Hegelian negative of Hegel,
an anti-Hegel carrying Hegel’s genetic lineage in filial relation with
Deleuze’s nurturing “maternal” figures (though information about Deleuze’s
relationship with his actual mother is sparse), especially Spinoza, whom
Lacan positions as “the philosopher of feminine assemblage,”59 though I
would esew any essentializing of gender, and Hegel was also deeply
influenced by the Dut philosopher.
Dosse tells us that Deleuze “found the mere mention of his ildhood
unbearable,”60 and although Deleuze describes his father as “a lovely man,
very benevolent, very good, very arming,” he was also a right-wing anti-
Semite, an ideological complex directly opposed to Deleuze’s own views,
though as Deleuze and Guaari write, again in relation to Kaa in a passage
that might as well be about Deleuze himself: “If the father maintains the
love and admiration of his son, that’s because in his ildhood, the father
already confronted some of the diabolical powers even if it meant being
beaten by them.”61 Deleuze writes elsewhere that Spinoza’s genius was “not
unrelated to the fact that he was Jewish,”62 so that one even wonders if the
fact that two of Deleuze’s three favorite philosophers, Spinoza and Bergson,
as well as the two novelists about whom he wrote books, Proust and Kaa,
were Jewish may partially have had something to do with a reaction against
his father, whom he nevertheless loved and admired. And that his other
favorite philosopher, Nietzse, struggled with anti-Semitism and ultimately
rejected it may also be related to this complex. Despite his words of praise
for his father, Claire Parnet, Deleuze’s student and collaborator, says to
Deleuze in the L’Abécédaire interview that “you repressed your ildhood,
you rejected it like an enemy and as hostile,”63 a aracterization with whi
Deleuze appears implicitly to agree, or at least he does not argue with it as
he does with so many other things in this same interview. at Deleuze
spent so mu time and energy denouncing the conception of Oedipus as a
privileged category – despite Deleuze and Guaari’s affirmation of the
Oedipal as a uniquely dominant and efficacious cultural mainery for
repression and control – mu like Nietzse’s denouncement of
ressentiment, seems partially to result from Deleuze’s own struggle with the
suffocating secret of the Oedipal, though this does not by any means render
his work with Guaari invalid. Rather, it recalls the suggestion that
philosophers primarily make great contributions in areas with whi they
personally struggle the most, as otherwise the motivation to engage in a
sufficiently deep and sustained way to push through to novel domains
would be laing.64
Deleuze seems implicitly to sanction this reading elsewhere in
L’Abécédaire, asking
 why does someone, someone in particular, you or me, get connected to
or identify especially with one kind of problem and not another? What
is someone’s affinity for a particular kind of problem? at seems to me
to be one of the greatest mysteries of thought. A person might be fated
for one problem since we don’t take on just any problem.

As Deleuze concludes, “I feel rather connected to problems that aim at

seeking the means to do away with the system of judgment, and to replace it
with something else,”65 and one can discern that he is expressing a
multivalent potency, variously described by Selling, Jung, and Hillman as
correlated to the negative, the father, and judgment. Deleuze wants to
replace the system of judgment, whi “prevents the emergence of any new
mode of existence” by reductively transforming differential “disjunction into
an either/or,” and resonant “connection into a relation of cause and effect,”66
but yet he harshly judges Hegel, not to mention Freud, in just su
hierarical binaries. ese judgments may partially, and rather prosaically,
stem from the fact that he was harshly judged by his parents in comparison
with his older brother, Georges, who died heroically fighting the Nazis, and
with whom the younger Deleuze was very close, Dosse writing that
“Deleuze was insignificant in his parents’ eyes,” and Deleuze’s friend Miel
Tournier telling Dosse that

Gilles always had a complex about his brother Georges. His parents
created a veritable cult around Georges, and Gilles couldn’t forgive
them for admiring only his elder brother. He was the second ild, the
mediocre son, while Georges was the hero.

Later, according to Dosse, “the trauma was quily repressed or alluded to

only ironically,” Deleuze telling a student in 1951 “that he had had a brother
‘but the dope stabbed himself with his Saint-Cyrien sword during a hazing.
It made him laugh. He made him out to be an idiot.’ ” And similarly, while
lecturing on Pierre Janet, who influenced Freud, “Deleuze recalled a vivid
ildhood memory of his father trying to help him with algebra during a
sool vacation” and that, in Deleuze’s words, “within five minutes, he was
shouting at me and I started crying.”67 Deleuze evidently suffered from a
potent Oedipal complex in relation to his father, whi was repressed
partially in reaction to the trauma from his brother’s death. So, in spite of
Deleuze and Guaari’s ambiguous denouncement of the Oedipal complex,
they are in fact, almost too obviously despite the ultimate complexity of
their thought, the dialectical antithesis to the Oedipal, the anti-Oedipal,
enabling a differentiated integration of the novel theories that their
denouncements of Hegel and Oedipus allowed them to construct with the
dialectic and the Oedipal complex as special cases of more expansive
processes of becoming.
Despite the superlative brilliance of Difference and Repetition, many of
the critiques of Hegel are strikingly reminiscent in their affective tone of an
adult son criticizing his father. No maer how harshly Deleuze condemns
Hegel, no maer how justified his complaints, he is still related to him, still
descended from him, more like him than he would care to admit, as one
does not spend page aer page critiquing something that does not maintain
a powerful hold on one’s mind. If Deleuze had thought Hegel just
completely ridiculous, he would simply have ignored him, so there is
something evidently Hegelian retained in Deleuze precisely as the negative,
as in a photographic negative, to his many positive concepts. As Deleuze
anowledges on the first page of the original preface to Difference and
Repetition, there was “a generalized anti-Hegelianism”
68 at that moment in

the late sixties in France, and it might be suggested that Deleuze’s antipathy
to Hegel is more intimately bound up with the image of the German
philosopher depicted by his teaer Jean Hippolyte than with Hegel himself.
One of Deleuze’s earliest expressions of difference appears in a 1954 review
of Hippolyte’s Logic and Existence, where he writes that “the riness of
Hippolyte’s book could then let us wonder”69 if su a differential
conception could go beyond Hegel and, perhaps implicitly, Hippolyte. Like
Nietzse with Wagner and Jung with Freud, Deleuze underwent a messy,
prolonged break with Hippolyte in 1967 aer having dedicated his first book
to him in 1953, and having initially worked with Hippolyte as his
dissertation advisor for what would become Difference and Repetition
before switing to another professor.
Hippolyte spread slanderous rumors about Deleuze’s sexuality, and
though Deleuze was admirably sanguine about the content, he found the
malicious intent of the rumors hurtful.70 And although Deleuze did not
participate in a volume dedicated to Hippolyte whi his friend Miel
Foucault organized in 1971, Deleuze’s reading of Fite in his last work,
“Immanence: A Life,” published just a few weeks before his death in 1995, is
deeply influenced by Hippolyte’s reading of the German idealist. It might be
suggested that Hegel served as a psyological substitute for Hippolyte, who
in turn was a substitution for Deleuze’s father, with whom he seems to have
had a markedly Oedipal relationship, whi would perhaps explain why he
was so keen to become an anti-Oedipal figure, eoing Nietzse’s becoming
the Antirist, having grown up in a deeply Christian family with a pastor
father who died when Nietzse was young, and sacrificing himself as a
martyr to an idea. But as with Nietzse, this recognition is far from
authorizing a dismissal of Deleuze’s thought, rather demonstrating how the
complex and paradoxical mainery constituted by the specific relations of
his experience allowed him to create su profound work, becoming perhaps
the most revered continental philosopher in the twenty-first century, in part
through an engagement with the Oedipal, whi Deleuze obliquely
recognized in 1962 as necessary for the process of creatively prolonging the
work of a precursor: “It is difficult to be someone’s heir without
unconsciously wishing for their death now and then.”71
Like Nietzse’s critique of ressentiment, whi was evidently made
possible by his struggle with that very affective complex, Deleuze was
evidently able, along with Guaari, so profoundly to critique the dominance
of the Oedipal complex in psyoanalysis precisely because he experienced
particular difficulties with his father. Deleuze and Guaari identify the
Oedipal complex as the psyoanalytic version of the Hegelian dialectic,
whi draws a direct connection between Deleuze’s critiques of Hegel and
Freud and his own Oedipal concerns, whi nevertheless allowed him to
produce these profoundly novel critiques, to demonstrate that the dialectic is
one extreme relation among others just as the Oedipal family dynamic is
one aretypal situation among others. Perhaps this is the secret of amor
fati, the love of fate whi Nietzse and Deleuze both affirmed: that the
deepest wounds are oen inextricably entwined with the greatest gis, and
that by working to heal our own wounds, by at least partially liberating
ourselves from their grip, we can gain the capacity, as wounded healers, to
mediate this same paradoxical liberation for others, though never in a
totalizing final solution, but through an always-provisional dissolution of
surface problematic expressions, like unidimensional opposition, to
emancipate the deeper and more topologically complex questions of the
depths.72
Intimately related to Deleuze’s critique of Hegel, the figure of the
“beautiful soul” is especially important for understanding the concept of
integration, and Deleuze’s great admiration for James, Bergson, and
Whitehead may provide a key to discerning the subtle nuances in the
historical unfolding of this concept. e phrase “beautiful soul” originated in
the mid-eighteenth century with the German araeologist and art historian
Johann Joaim Winelmann,73 who influenced Nietzse, and the figure
was brought to broad public aention by Goethe’s 1795 novel, Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship, the classic bildungsroman, book VI of whi is
entitled “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul.” It tells the story of a woman who,
struggling with some general undefined illness throughout her life (one may
think of both Nietzse’s and Deleuze’s illnesses in this context74),
myopically ignores reality in all its problematic complexity pollyannaishly
to assert that all conflicts and oppositions can be easily and painlessly
reconciled in God. is somewhat unflaering depiction is a straightforward
and rather prosaic account of a conventionally religious, sanctimonious
pietist aitude, whi reminds one in some ways of Nietzse’s mother and
sister. In fact, Nietzse dismissively employs the phrase in several works, an
employment of whi Deleuze certainly would have been aware.75
However, it has not been widely anowledged in studies of Deleuze’s
work that the figure of the beautiful soul may have misogynist roots, as one
might, in the context of twenty-first century feminism, understand why the
conspicuously unnamed female protagonist in Goethe’s narrative would
want to refrain from marriage and retire from public life in order to
maintain her spiritual and practical autonomy rather than becoming a wife
subservient to her husband and the patriaral norms of her era, “a whole
social meanism destined to reduce her to the demands of marriage and
reproduction,”76 as Deleuze writes, without mentioning the beautiful soul, in
a 1976 review of Alain Roger’s novel Le Misogyne. Goethe roughly based his
narrative on the subsequently lost autobiography of a family friend, Susanne
von Kleenberg,77 while in 1806, the German novelist Friederike Helene
Unger published a different version of the story, whose protagonist is named
Mirabella, under the title Confessions of a Beautiful Soul Written by Herself
whi, as Mielle A. Reyes explains, was intended as a feminist response to
Goethe’s novel, a project whi Goethe unsurprisingly disdained. As Reyes
summarizes recent feminist readings of these texts, Unger’s novel radically
revises Goethe’s narrative, as whereas Goethe’s aracter is always in a
paternalistic relation with men, first her fiancée and then her uncle, Unger
depicts a progressive liberation from male dominance, providing her
aracter with an independent self-determination. Unger appropriates the
figure of the beautiful soul, a year before Hegel employed this figure in the
Phenomenology, to provide the countervalent depiction of a mu more
dynamic, active, and creative feminine figure than Goethe’s aracter. It is
clear, then, that the pervasive male interpretation of this figure, from Goethe
in 1795 through Deleuze in 1968, demonstrates a profound unawareness of
the situation of women in the eighteenth century, despite Deleuze’s
generally keen aention to feminist concerns, making this particular woman
a figure for an abstract idealism that avoids concrete action in the world and
asserts that all conflict will be resolved in a state of perfect unity.78
Deleuze’s primary source for the figure appears to have been Hegel
himself, who describes the beautiful soul as “too fine to commit itself to
anything” because “it does not want to stain the radiance of its pure
conscientiousness by deciding to do anything particular. It keeps its heart
pure by fleeing from contact with actuality and preserving its impotence.”79
It has been suggested that Hegel’s evocation of the beautiful soul implicitly
refers to figures as disparate as Goethe himself, Fite, Rousseau, Hölderlin,
and even Christ,80 whom Hippolyte discusses in relation to this figure, as
Deleuze must have been aware. Deleuze was clearly influenced by Hegel
enough to turn his own concept of the beautiful soul against him, so it seems
only fair reciprocally to turn Deleuze’s critique of dialectical dualism against
Deleuze himself, but only in order to assist in his liberation from the one-
sidedness of his critique. Just as Deleuze seeks, perhaps unconsciously, to
inoculate himself against an Oedipal reading of his rejection of Hegel, it
might be suggested that Hegel employs the figure of the beautiful soul to
inoculate himself against precisely the critique that Deleuze levels against
him, so we may discern that Hegel at least vaguely foresaw Deleuze’s
critique and thus sought preemptively to ward it off just as Deleuze sought
preemptively to ward off the Oedipal critique.81 And the two philosophers
should both be given mu credit for possessing the exceptional foresight to
address these central criticisms, though it was simply not possible for them
to discern the full contours of these parallel critiques in their historical
moments. Like all philosophers, they necessarily engage in oppositional one-
sidedness despite their epoal aempts to overcome oppositionality, as
there is a very large portion of partial validity in their respective theories
(the dialectical negative and the anti-Hegelian), but there is also partial
validity in the critique of these theories, so that it has required the passage
of generations to see clearly the way to go beyond the blind spots and
limitations of even these most profound and far-seeing theorists. Rather than
a condemnation, this is merely the recognition that we are all limited, and
that later thinkers will inevitably surpass even the best of us, though they
can only accomplish this feat by standing on our shoulders.
And it must be anowledged that Deleuze partially anticipated the
critique of his critique of Hegel’s critique of the beautiful soul, so that one
might be forgiven for feeling a sense of vertigo as one reads the passages on
this subject in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze recognizing that a primary
danger in propounding a purely differential philosophy free of the negative
and identical of the Hegelian dialectic is precisely that of the beautiful soul,
whi asserts that all differences are “reconcilable and federative,” a mode of
thought “far removed from bloody struggles” whi merely asserts
difference without opposition. However, having performed this self-
awareness that the mere rejection of opposition in favor of an abstract
radical tolerance not practicable in actuality is the very pitfall of the
beautiful soul that Hegel warned against, Deleuze nevertheless argues that
the affirmation of difference can “release a power of aggression and selection
whi destroys the beautiful soul by depriving it of its very identity and
breaking its good will,”82 an affirmation of persistent problems and questions
whi avoids the totalizing unification of the dialectical reconciliation of
opposites that Deleuze discerns in Hegel. e simple binarity of opposition
thus becomes a surface appearance of a deeper difference. And having
apparently inoculated his differential philosophy against the beautiful soul,
Deleuze turns this figure ba upon Hegel, accusing him of finding that even
the most fraught and apparently irreconcilable oppositions are ultimately
reconcilable in a return to identity. Deleuze understands this conception as
succumbing to the need to imagine the possibility of perfect, absolute
solutions to problematic differences, whereas Deleuze finds that there are
differences that can never be reconciled, or that if they are reconciled on one
plane, these differences inevitably lead to other incommensurabilities, so
that the idealist dream of aaining complete wholeness and oneness is a
dangerous and totalizing fantasy.
ere is mu truth in this critique, as the negative does not always lead
to a reconciled identity. As Jung understood, an essential aspect of the
process of individuation is recognizing the other as genuinely other,
withdrawing the projection into the other that animates the Hegelian
dialectic, itself an essential stage in the individuation process, to allow real
differences to subsist that require oen painfully negotiated, and oen
inadequate, compromises whi eternally defer the ideal of complete
reconciliation, the dream of “peaceful coexistence.”83 But Deleuze, oen
foreseeing potential criticisms despite his periodic lapse into the opposition
against opposition, the negation of the negative, also admits that “to throw
the taste for pure differences ba at the beautiful soul”84 is also inadequate,
itself participating in that very complex. He asserts that only affirmation
returns in the eternal return, though he does not consistently apply this
insight to his own negation of the Hegelian dialectic, and a half-century
aer his pioneering efforts, we may discern that even the negation of
negation itself does not return, and thus the affirmation of the partial,
contextual validity of negation must necessarily return if we are truly to
affirm difference, a formulation whi is nevertheless susceptible to the
critique of the beautiful soul. It may even be suggested that the proliferating
accusations of the beautiful soul complex have something of the aracter of
the Terror in the Fren Revolution, so that no revolutionary, even the
leaders of the revolution like Danton and Robespierre, is spared
condemnation and the guillotine, while in Unger’s novel, Mirabella is living
the life that she wants to live, reading the books that she wants to read. As
with the Terror, one cannot ultimately cleanse thought of the beautiful soul,
but must rather wait for the vertiginous counterrevolutions to the
counterrevolutions to subside, so that not only the complex becomes
something to guard against, but also the denouncement of that complex,
whi carried to the opposite extreme itself remains within the gravitational
orbit of that very complex, and is perhaps even subtly misogynist.
In an insight whi the figure of the beautiful soul can only caricature,
and thus provide a warning against delusional oversimplification for both
the idealist and the critic of idealism, but whi this caricature cannot
dismiss in its full nuanced complexity, this Oedipal struggle of Deleuze with
Hegel – around whi he ingeniously builds fortifications through the very
concept of the beautiful soul and the denouncement of Oedipus, almost
completely inoculating himself from su criticism, leaving only the tiniest
of cras whi we can perhaps peer through a half-century later – can be
seen as necessary for his individuation from both his father and the
collective father complex operative at that moment in relation to Hegel. It is
this contradictory, self-enclosed, paradoxical negation of the dialectic whi
confirms the dialectic, and thus allows Deleuze to integrate the dialectic
with other modes of thought to produce a novel dialectical conception that
subsumes the Hegelian dialectic in a more expansive mode whi affirms
both the dialectic and its negation. So, in the paradoxical manner that
Deleuze so loved – as “any concept is bound to be a paradox”85 – but to
whi he was partially blind in this particular case central to this text, by
rejecting the Hegelian dialectic, he enacts and affirms that dialectic, a
sustained problematic tension whi allows a novel mode of thought to
emerge.
Deleuze asserts that “no one passes less for a beautiful soul than
Nietzse” as “his soul is extremely beautiful, but not in the sense of the
beautiful soul” because of his “sense for cruelty” and his “taste for
destruction.”86 Nevertheless, it is striking that the internal narrative
described in Goethe’s novel resembles nothing so mu as the ecstatic,
transformational raptures, experienced mostly in solitude, bordering on
delusion, described by Nietzse himself, especially in Ecce Homo,87 though
whereas the nameless woman in Goethe’s novel takes God as her object of
imaginal veneration, Nietzse elevates himself and his own genius, as
Dionysus and the Antirist, but also as e Crucified, to a worshipful
degree. And this inverted resonance is not so farfeted as it may at first
seem to a cursory glance given that the woman is Christian and Nietzse is
probably the most noted “anti-Christian” in history. is is evidently an
opposition whi affirms the identity of the relation, as Nietzse’s father,
who died young and whom he revered, was a pastor, and Nietzse himself
was devoutly religious until the age of twenty. As Lou Salome aptly
observed, Nietzse’s rejection of Christianity was still in the realm of the
religious, was aieved in a way that inverted the religious rather than
simply leaving it behind,88 a recognition eoed by Heidegger who said of
Nietzse’s anti-Christianity that “everything ‘anti’ thinks in the spirit of
that against whi it is ‘anti’ ”89 (one must also think of Anti-Oedipus in this
regard), so that mu of what Zarathustra says is derived from the sayings
of Jesus in the New Testament, twisted and reconstituted in clever,
paradoxical ways, “gathered from the Bible and turned ba against it,” as
Deleuze writes.90 Nietzse explicitly rejected Christianity, but replaced God
with Dionysus, and ultimately with himself, whi became the aracteristic
modern substitution in the worship of the artistic or intellectual genius that
perhaps found its peak in the twentieth century. So, Nietzse, who was
magnificently inconsistent, and who said many brilliant as well as many
deeply questionable things, forged, along with Selling, a way to think
beyond the Hegelian form of the dialectic in its incipience, whi Deleuze
refined and extended, though it may be possible further to prolong this
mode of thought by anowledging that not only is the dialectic susceptible
to critique, but that this very critique is reciprocally susceptible to a
dialectical mode of thought. Although both Hegel and Deleuze presciently
foresaw these susceptibilities in their work, it falls to our later generations
further to integrate these critiques, whi it was not possible for them, in
their pioneering efforts, to allow to permeate their philosophies, whi were
necessarily forged against a projected other, a necessity from whi not even
these greatest of all philosophers could ultimately escape.
Furthermore, it is important to recognize that, by Deleuze’s definition,
James, Bergson, and Whitehead could also potentially be dismissed as
beautiful souls, though Deleuze was deeply influenced by all three, and he
even expresses the more nuanced version of integration resonant with their
conceptions, whi Hegel partially and inconsistently foresaw, though
Deleuze obstinately denies him this nuance, perhaps for the psyological
and metadialectical reasons suggested above. As Malabou particularly
recognizes, Deleuze’s reading of Hegel is a reductive oversimplification that
renders the dialectical tendency of thought absurd, but the fact is that any
mode of thought, including those expressed by Nietzse and Deleuze, can
be rendered absurd by carrying the most unaritable and least nuanced
expression of a particular mode to its logical conclusion. And if Hegel plays
a unique role for Deleuze as enemy, Whitehead plays a similarly unique role
in that he receives perhaps the highest degree of praise lavished on any
philosopher by Deleuze, rivaling Deleuze’s Trinity of Spinoza, Nietzse, and
Bergson, while receiving very lile actual exposition in Deleuze’s work. In
fact, it was not until 1988 that Deleuze devoted one brief apter to
Whitehead in his book about Leibniz.91 e ratio of praise to exposition is
higher for Whitehead than any other figure, whi perhaps suggests that the
English philosopher exerted a more central influence on Deleuze than one
might be led to assume by a cursory reading.
 Russell J. Duvernoy argues that Whitehead manages to elude the complex
of the beautiful soul, Duvernoy obliquely bringing the paradoxically
universal validity of that figure into question, but also partially subjecting
Whitehead to Deleuze’s critical authority. And the conceptual persona of
Deleuze does indeed exude an admiedly overwhelming authority founded
upon unquestionable and almost unique brilliance, whi is ironically
resonant with Hegel’s similarly dominant authority in the nineteenth
century, and also with Whitehead in certain circles. In fact, it might even be
suggested, as Beman does, that Deleuze’s thought is so overwhelmingly
powerful that it is oen employed as a dogmatic orthodoxy, despite the
extraordinarily heterodox quality of his work, a “perverse but surprisingly
frequent way of approaing”92 his thought, so that a half-century aer
Difference and Repetition, it may be necessary for Deleuzeans to begin more
assertively to push against Deleuze’s limitations, especially in relation to
Hegel, while still affirming his greatness and employing his positive
concepts. Duvernoy convincingly shows how Whitehead avoids enacting the
beautiful soul, marshaling complex arguments to demonstrate how
Whitehead’s concrescent integration, partially constituted in differentiated
contrast, is not merely a placid movement toward unification, though I
would suggest, without rehearsing Malabou’s equally complex and
insightful arguments, that the same is oen true of Hegel. As Duvernoy
shows, Whitehead’s recognition of evil and irreducible discord preclude him
from being considered a beautiful soul, though it might be suggested that if
one were to deemphasize the absolute in Hegel’s work, an admiedly
heterodox reading, the dialectical negative itself could be conceived as
playing a similar differentiating function in Hegel, the initiatory ordeal of
Hermeticism whi Duvernoy invokes in relation to Joshua Ramey’s The
Hermetic Deleuze, though the Hegelian negative operates primarily in the

special case of oppositional difference.93

However, pulling ba to view this question in a wider frame, there is not
an especially compelling reason completely to submit Whitehead, or even
Hegel, to Deleuze’s test, a trial and judgment whi Duvernoy recognizes is
counter to the general trajectory of Deleuze’s thought toward the liberation
from philosophy as legislation. Whereas Deleuze, despite his exhortation to
affirmation, possesses an unmistakable drive toward denouncement
primarily in relation to Hegel and the Oedipal, Duvernoy quotes Stengers
that Whitehead’s approa is not that of “a denouncer,”94 as can be
witnessed in Whitehead’s mu more restrained critique of Hegel. It might
be efficacious to allow the elder Whitehead to instruct Deleuze on this
particular issue, even as Whitehead could benefit in significant ways from
the younger philosopher’s mode of thought, to lead Deleuze from the
denouncement of Hegel to an anowledgment of the conceptual persona
whi designates his body of work as an important but limited precursor
(and who among us is not limited?).95 In fact, in both Empiricism and
Subjectivity and What Is Grounding?, Deleuze is mu more sympathetic to
Hegel than he is in his texts from the following decade, so that Deleuze can
perhaps also learn from his younger self in this regard.96 One might thus
recognize that the beautiful soul complex is not an unforgivable sin
punishable by expulsion from the pure heights of philosophical illumination,
paradoxically pure by means of the steely-eyed refusal of purity, but one of
many potentialities that, when carried to an extreme, can enable certain
kinds of insight but preclude others, just as the very denouncement of
Hegel’s purported sin adjudicated by Deleuze is also an extreme of a
different potentiality that, as Wahl implicitly understood in relation to
Whitehead, as well as to Hegel, Nietzse, and Deleuze, can enable
complementary insights but preclude the insights available to a different
modality.97
It may even be suggested that the very denouncement of the beautiful
soul is a negative inversion of the beautiful soul itself, so that the
recognition that one must remain open to the discord and suffering of
contrasting difference can, in the extreme form that Deleuze enacts, tend
toward a dogmatic means of totalizing judgment just as the extreme form of
the beautiful soul totalizes in its certainty that all differences are
reconcilable in a harmonious return to identity. It appears that what is
required is an integration of this opposition between the beautiful soul and
that figure’s denouncement to recognize that both modes contain partial,
limited validity, so that aaining a differentiated and contrasting balance
between these stubbornly incommensurable perspectives might be the most
efficacious way to overcome this binary. And Deleuze abstractly understood
this necessity of leing go of rigid oppositionality, of de-escalating the
conflict, writing a decade aer Difference and Repetition: “You should not
try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a
completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something
passes between the two whi is neither in one nor the other.”98 We should
follow Deleuze’s advice and apply this wise approa to overcoming the
dizzyingly recursive opposition to Deleuze’s opposition with Hegelian
opposition, as Deleuze and Guaari were not particularly concerned with
the coherence of their projects,99 instead directing their aention toward
novel conceptual creation.
In addition to formulating complex reasons for how Whitehead manages
to avoid being a beautiful soul so that we can understand how Deleuze
could praise him so highly given that some of Whitehead’s concepts look
remarkably like the most sophisticated version of the totalizing union of the
beautiful soul, it might also be efficacious to problematize the universality of
the figure of the beautiful soul itself. We can perhaps understand Deleuze’s
drive to avoid the beautiful soul at all costs as an expression of his particular
aracter elaborated in sustained negotiation with the contextual
requirements of his era and his biography. And we can also recognize that
Whitehead’s greater emphasis of integration over difference is not an error,
but rather “that slightest ange of tone whi yet makes all the difference,”
the measured, pragmatic optimism of a man who has found wisdom through
the suffering caused by the loss of his son, expressing an expansive warmth
and generosity, articulated in its most complex valence, as a complement to
the oen unseling trister-like transgressivity of Deleuze, whi is
nevertheless extremely profound and admirable, and oen very generous. It
seems likely that Deleuze praises Whitehead so highly not because he
agreed with everything the older philosopher thought, or with everything
thought by any thinker, even Spinoza, Nietzse, and Bergson, but because
Deleuze recognizes in all of these theorists a rare greatness and freedom, so
that he can write in 1966 that

this liberation, this embodiment of cosmic memory in creative

emotions, undoubtedly only takes place in privileged souls. It leaps
from one soul to another … and from soul to soul, it traces the design of
an open society, a society of creators, where we pass from one genius to
another, through the intermediary of disciples or spectators or
hearers.100

Given that Deleuze spends so mu time with Hegel, even as his differential
heteron, one might suspect that Hegel could also be considered one of these
privileged souls, a phrase whi bears an ironic resemblance to the beautiful
soul, so that the controversy between Hegel and Deleuze, involving
numerous other thinkers, constitutes what Deleuze would later describe,
though not specifically in relation to Hegel, as “an interstellar conversation,
between very irregular stars, whose different becomings form a mobile
bloc,”101 Malabou’s Hegel-Deleuze blo of becoming.
From these considerations, it can be adduced that Deleuze’s negative
project of rejecting binarity, especially in the form of the Hegelian dialectic,
can never quite succeed on these terms, as this rejection itself sets up a new
binary between binarity itself and difference. Any rejection of one concept
in favor of an opposed concept is ultimately proof of the partial validity of
the dialectic, and although Deleuze might reject this view as enacting the
beautiful soul, the denouncement of the beautiful soul itself participates in
binarity by rejecting binarity in favor of the emphasis on multiplicitous
difference that is opposed to it. Binarity is paradoxically inescapable as long
as one hopes to escape binarity. at is, rather than rejecting opposition
altogether, an impossible, self-defeating task, one can instead relegate
opposition to the status of a special case of difference, but avoid the
beautiful soul by understanding that not all differences are reconcilable,
though they may form an essential contrast within a larger totality, a
persistent incommensurability, recognizing that the two entities constituting
a differential relation exist in the same world and thus are related in that
most basic sense as Whiteheadian negative prehensions. ough these
entities may stubbornly and eternally resist reconciliation, they can at least
be integrated as disparate elements in a drama, actors wearing various
masks whose narrative function is precisely to maintain their inexorable
difference, Deleuze writing in 1978 that “every accord is dissonant.”102 As
Hegel, Whitehead, and Deleuze all understood, integrations are not only
positive, and integration is not always a confluent process, as something is
generally lost or deemphasized in ea integration, and even what at first
can be a vital and generative composition of disparate elements inevitably
seles into a static, enclosing orthodoxy whi requires rupture through
novel differentiations, lines of flight whi must in turn approa points of
diminishing return, must lose momentum and rea a critical pain and
dissonance for whi novel integrations are required.
And although these male philosophers have viewed the religious
asceticism of the woman in Goethe’s novel as especially laughable, whether
explicitly or implicitly, we might recognize that all of these men – Goethe,
Hegel, Nietzse, Deleuze – thinking in the most abstract and impractical
possible registers, are ultimately not so different from the beautiful soul in
that their pursuit of an ideal, the ideal of novel conceptual and imaginal
creation, is relatively similar to the woman’s religiosity that they all
implicitly deride. e beautiful soul is thus, at least in one register, a mere
insult with misogynist overtones, whi allows these philosophers implicitly
to judge one another as “feminine” in an unbroken lineage of legislation,
even as Deleuze explicitly rejects su legislation and is generally very
sensitive to feminist concerns. Perhaps the lesson to be taken from this
legislative lineage is that, returning to the woman who keeps herself
separate from life in service to an ideal, we might have compassion for her,
for Goethe, for Hegel, for Nietzse, and even for Deleuze, who were all
doing the best they could in the contexts in whi they found themselves,
creating the preconditions for their own overcomings. In the end, we might
even find that being a beautiful soul is no worse than it sounds, as Unger
implies, not worthy of contempt or ridicule, but a stage of understanding
that some of us might find ourselves oppositionally able to supersede, while
still others of us might find ourselves able to go even further to discern the
legitimacy in the oppositional critique, but also to love and even to admire
su a person. It might even be suggested that the beautiful soul is closely
related to the Jamesian tender-minded temperament, as opposed to the
tough-minded temperament, and that Deleuze could perhaps benefit from a
bit more balance in this opposition, at least in relation to Hegel. And one
might further suggest that, despite the vast space Deleuze clears for the
creation of novel concepts, in maers of life and death – or of death and
rebirth – the subtle but significant Jamesian, Bergsonian, and Whiteheadian
emphasis of integration over differentiation, of contrasting differentiation as
primarily enabling the process of concrescent integration, may be somewhat
more efficacious for the living of life, a “slightest ange of tone” from the
Deleuzean mode of thought with whi these precursors have so mu in
common, and by whom Deleuze was deeply influenced, though perhaps
even Deleuze enacted this subtle shi in his later work.
It should not be surprising that Hegel, as the dominant philosopher two
centuries ago, whose influence has been powerfully felt ever since, should
nevertheless have been superseded and overcome in significant ways in the
succeeding centuries, and Selling, James, and Deleuze have played
especially significant roles in this overcoming. But a half-century on, we can
be expected, yet again, to see even further, to overcome this previous
overcoming, so that the vanguard of philosophy is no longer primarily
engaged in critique, in denouncing and rendering problematic the concepts
of past theorists, whi already seems to have reaed its apex in Derrida
and, more ambivalently, Deleuze, though critique will always remain an
essential instrument in the theoretical armamentarium. e philosophy of
Deleuze’s future may be in a subtle shi of emphasis that allows one not to
take Deleuze’s critique of Hegel so seriously, so mu to heart, to take this
critique with the same grain of salt with whi one must take Nietzse at
his most extreme, harrowing, and transgressive.
Applying the affirmation that Deleuze advocates to what may be
conceived as the inevitable blind spots in his own work, we can see that the
rejection of Hegel was efficacious, the absolute enemy against whom
Deleuze found it generative to push, and uniquely so in his oeuvre, in order
to create his startlingly novel concepts, whi are barely less startling a half-
century later, even as the critique of Hegel can be de-emphasized as a
contextually necessary, but somewhat overwrought and even atavistic,
remnant of an earlier time. If it were not the case that we could discern
some limitation and myopia in Deleuze, he would be the first and only
philosopher in history of whom this could be said, so a more plausible
narrative is that he carried thought as far as he could, and no further, as
must we all. On this view, it is not even necessary to “save” Hegel, as he was
never in danger. He did the most that any philosopher can hope to do: he
expressed a novel mode of thought whi embodied the spirit of his age, and
created the precondition for later philosophers, including those like Deleuze
who denounced him, to exist at all. Like a father with his ildren,
grandildren, and great-grandildren, no philosopher can hope to create a
complete and perfect system that will stand forever, but only to give his
progeny, of whatever gender, the opportunity to go beyond him, though this
going beyond need not be limited to an Oedipal relation.
e dialectic is not ultimately Hegel’s solitary invention, but a deepening
of the figural movement of the Trinity, dwelled upon by Christian
theologians for the beer part of two millennia before Hegel, expressed in
perhaps its most sophisticated form by Niolas of Cusa,103 and issuing into
the stream of German idealism with Kant, Fite, and Selling. But the
dialectic is also genealogically descended from the rarefaction in the alembic
to produce the philosopher’s stone that was the focus of alemy for over a
thousand years, and these medieval expressions of the reconciliation of
opposites are descended from manifold expressions that can be traced far
ba into antiquity, long before the beginning of what we think of as
philosophy with the pre-Socratics, ba into the mythical era of human
culture as the death and rebirth of a god, or of an initiate into sacred
mysteries.104 So the aempt completely to escape the Hegelian form of the
dialectic is evidently doomed to fail, as this is ultimately an aempt to
escape the necessity of descent into the unconscious to encounter the
shadow and anima as other in order to be transformed. Deleuze otherwise
complexly affirmed this descent, for instance writing in the eighties that “the
struggle with the shadow is the only real struggle,” mediating a rebirth once
a critical threshold has been reaed, a liberating renascence requiring a
catastrophic fatality exemplified in the Flood, as “this liberation can occur
only by passing through the catastrophe”105 enacting “the difficult birth of a
new world.”106 Deleuze’s rejection of dialectical opposition, whi is a
rejection of the foundational, and oen limiting, categories of Western
thought, is itself a metadialectical operation, the dialectical rejection of the
dialectic in order to produce a novel dialectical mode beyond reconciliation,
an Overman capable of overcoming the inevitably limited previous
expressions of this urge toward transformation through encounter with
otherness. And this overcoming is embodied in a multivalent relational
potentiality that lies occulted in the subtle interstices of these actual
expressions, not in some ultimately inaccessible transcendent world of
Forms, but intricated in immanent process, in the dynamic constraints
through whi the world becomes, an unconscious transcendental domain of
virtuality whi yearns for, and demands, actualization.107
Deleuze’s rejection of the dialectic was necessary and instrumental in
forging his novel mode of thought, but this rejection was too extreme, too
vociferous, undermining itself – one might even say deconstructing itself.
However, the positive mode of thought whose production this critique and
rejection enabled is profound, and not ultimately a discontinuous rupture
with the modes of thought traced multivalently in the apters above, but a
refinement and complication of those modes, whi allows us to think in
novel ways and, perhaps most importantly, to express this novel mode in
language that can viably populate the centers of discursive power to become
predominant aer the deconstruction of oppositional metaphysics. Deleuze’s
expression of a mode free from opposition is a “thought of the future,”108
though a half-century on, we still find ourselves contending with the
starkest oppositions, both political and cultural. We may envisage, with
Deleuze, a world and a mode of thought beyond opposition that is not
merely a harmoniously unifying reconciliation, but we are not done with
opposition yet – far from it. Deleuze can thus be recognized not as primarily
providing solutions to our most urgent problems, but as creating openings to
still barely discernible future worlds through his posing of deeper problems
and more expansive questions requiring novel conceptual creations.
In contrast to the stance of Graham Harman that “the true danger to
thought is not relativism but idealism,”109 I would tend to agree with Duffy,
who is in turn agreeing with Sommers-Hall, when he writes that “Deleuze
effectively precludes any sense in whi his philosophy could be interpreted
as either materialist or idealist, at least insofar as ea of these terms refers
only to the exclusion of the categories comprised by the other,”110 an
overcoming of this duality whi Deleuze explicitly expresses in Cinema 1,
eoing Bergson.111 e whole thrust of Deleuze’s thought is to overcome
su either-or oppositions in favor of the affirmation of “AND … AND …
AND… ,”112 an overcoming whi he imperfectly performed, though his
thought has rendered further overcomings possible as mu as any other
theorist since the second half of the twentieth century. Deleuze oen gives
the impression of playing all sides, of being susceptible to appropriation by
different, and even opposed, sools of thought without commiing
completely to any one preexisting sool. By playing the philosophical
coquee, flirting with different modes, he draws different kinds of theorists
into his web, his erotic gravitational orbit, and then as soon as they get close,
start to become excited, he pulls away, creating a doubt and longing, an
undecidability. And by stringing along a broad range of admiring but oen
bemused readers, he creates the precondition for the integration of these
differentiated modes.
So, it is not that I simply disagree with Deleuze about the Hegelian
dialectic and the beautiful soul, but that I think it would be efficacious to
shi the emphasis of his critique of Hegel to a more loving refinement and
course correction rather than a harsh denouncement, whi seems
unnecessary to pursue any further given the later context of Hegel’s
reception, whi has been shaped to a large extent by Deleuze himself. To
summarize my critique of Deleuze’s critique of Hegel, one could think of
e Dude’s exasperated exclamation to his best friend Walter Sobak in
The Big Lebowski, when Walter repeatedly asks, “Am I wrong? Am I
wrong?” to whi e Dude replies: “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just
an asshole.”113 But this is no indictment of Deleuze, who seems to have
enjoyed discussing anuses and taking philosophers “from behind” to produce
“monstrous”114 progeny with great good humor, always with a genially
transgressive irreverence. And, in fact, Deleuze makes a similar point in
Dialogues II, where he writes that

every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: ‘OK, OK,
let’s go on to something else.’ Objections have never contributed
anything. It’s the same when I am asked a general question. e aim is
not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it.115

So, in a Deleuzean spirit, let us give Deleuze the same courtesy he gave
himself, though he never quite managed to give that same courtesy to Hegel,
and go on to something else, to Deleuze’s positive concepts (though these are
oen intimately intertwined with critique), whi have served to make him
one of the most profoundly influential philosophers of the last few decades.
A Mythical Dialectic
e terms “difference” and “repetition” appear together in 1956’s “Bergson’s
Conception of Difference,” and again a decade later in Proust and Signs and
Bergsonism, where Deleuze writes that “memory is essentially difference

and maer essentially repetition,”116 implicitly referring to Bergson’s Matter

and Memory, formulating an essential correlation between Bergson’s work

and his own. In his book, Bergson equates memory with spirit,117 so that
Difference and Repetition is an unambiguous, though somewhat indirect,

reframing of the duality of spirit and maer.118 Deleuze reformulated the

overcoming of this oppositional relation in numerous texts, for instance
writing in 1981 that “the spirit is the body itself, the body without organs,”119
variously equating spirit, difference, the Tao, Spinozan immanence, the
Nietzsean will to power,120 and the body without organs (though Deleuze
anowledges that he and Guaari “never did understand ‘the organless
body’ in quite the same way”121). Repetition and difference supersede
negative opposition and identity, whi are closely related to traditional
modes of thought that construct philosophical language and concepts as
representing, making again-present, an originary transcendent identity
behind appearances, a mode whi Deleuze asserts must be overcome to
“think difference in itself” rather than subordinating difference to binarity.
Difference is the multiplicity of relations that exceed the hegemony of
identity and negation, exemplified in the judgment of Aristotle and Kant,
while repetition is partially derived from Nietzse’s eternal return
containing “disguised and displaced” differences. Only those differential
relations whi are affirmed return in the process of becoming, while that
whi is negated does not return, though we may recognize along with
Hegel, as well as most of the others discussed above, that the negative
remains an instrumental necessity, something of whose form is retained in
the actual contours of that whi is affirmed as the contrast of Whiteheadian
negative prehensions.
 is conception of the shadowy negative as one form of Being among
others is coherent with the univocity that Deleuze derives partially from
Spinoza. e differentiation into various modes, su as the diversity of
philosophical sools, all refer to the same Being rather than subsisting
separately, in the Cartesian manner, as subject and object, though
differentiated modes may, in many cases, be completely incommensurable,
having no direct loci of connection or relation among them other than their
relation to a univocal Being from whi all oppositions are coerced into
binarity from a more expansive differential plurality. is oppositional
coercion may itself be conceived as a differentiated mode, but not an
intrinsically privileged one. Space and time are particular constructions from
a matrix of differential potentialities forming a heterogenous univocal
multiplicity, an infinitely complex open network of relations from whi
reality in the particular forms that we encounter it extracts itself. is self-
extraction does not only occur by means of local tensions generating
intensity through the limitation to a single dimensional axis, a first-order
power and depth of whi opposition is a second-order surface effect, as flat
opposition is always cut out of a more voluminous topological manifold of
radiating differential trajectories (“multiplicity” is the translation of
“multiplicité,” the Fren word for Riemannian “manifolds”122). Becoming
occurs more generally through the ever-shiing selection and emphasis of
these vital relational trajectories partially defined by contrasting disparity, a
mode of expression especially resonant with Whitehead.
Deleuze discerns this differential depth of Being, this “ultimate unity”123
for whi opposition is a reductive simplification, as expressed in all
domains across scale, not only in geometry and physics, but in the domains
accessible to biology, psyology, sociology, and linguistics. However, it may
be recognized that all modes, not only oppositional conflict, require the
suppression or deemphasis of other modes (one generally cannot write
philosophy and dance at the same time). So binarity can perhaps be
reframed as one valid mode of construction among others, whi elicits
certain aspects of process at the expense of others, a recognition required for
overcoming the hegemony of opposition, though it may be efficacious to pull
ba from the ironically oppositional denouncement of oppositionality to
discern this paradoxical operation as a necessary transitional reversal for
whi we can now discern the negative and the identical it presupposes as
one particular form of complex potentiality. But it must also be recognized
that this oppositional mode remains dominant in philosophy, not only
among Hegelians, but perhaps even more egregiously in analytic philosophy,
whi generally conceives of philosophical discourse as the oppositional
combat between discrete categories and sools of thought. One can thus
envisage the Hegelian dialectic as a bridge between the narrowly rationalist
mode aracteristic of analytic thought, whi Deleuze tended to dismiss or
ignore altogether, exemplified in the “philosophical catastrophe” of
Wigenstein,124 and an affirmation of differential multiplicity beyond the
hegemony of opposition whi Deleuze renders thinkable.
As seen above in relation to Selling, and as will be discussed below in
relation to Deleuze’s conception of Ideas, and especially in relation to
Hillman, the negative can be figured as a problematic potentiality associated
with Kronos.125 He is an equal dramatis persona in the polytheistic
pantheon that Deleuze oen evokes, neither privileged as this potency has
oen been in service to the differentiation of oppositional rationality, nor
denigrated as a mere “epiphenomenology”126 of spirit as Deleuze does in his
bid to “overturn Platonism”127 (while nevertheless retaining mu of what is
good in Plato) and enthrone a pluralistic differential affirmation. is
affirmation of pluralism at the expense of negation can be understood as a
transitional reversal creating the precondition for the recognition that
differential pluralism must affirm even the partial validity of the negative
and monism if it is to be a true pluralism that does not paradoxically define
itself by negating the negative, the “magic formula we all seek – pluralism =
monism,”128 as Deleuze and Guaari write.
In fact, as Deleuze affirms, though he inconsistently practices this
affirmation in relation to this particular opposition at the heart of his
critique, rendering the negative as neither privileged nor denigrated is not
merely a resolution of the opposition, but the dissipation of the
contradiction by discovering the deeper problem of whi this contradiction
is a shadow, though this shadow is precisely the negative and can thus be
conceived as a primary actor among others in the drama of becoming that
Deleuze describes. And he does distinguish between two forms of naysaying
in Nietzse’s Zarathustra, so that the “No” uered by the figure of the Ass
enacts the privileging of negation whi suppresses other forms of difference
and conserves the burdensome “old values,” while the “No” of Zarathustra
himself creates “new values” by saying “No” to the “No” of the Ass, and thus
affirming a differential multiplicity.129 In this way, Deleuze affirms the
necessity of negation freed by its own operation from its hegemony, though
it may also be discerned that this negation whi serves to overcome even
itself is precisely aracteristic of the Hegelian dialectic, especially when the
absolute is relegated to an instrumental role. e absolute is a dramatis
persona that must be dethroned and deemphasized to allow the other
personae to emerge in their pluralistic multiplicity, but it can never be finally
slain, as the potency of Kronos corresponding to the absolute is death itself,
the positive being of the negative, the transcendental Freudian “death
instinct,” among its other masks. Deleuze writes that negation is “difference
seen from its underside, seen from below,” and resonant with the project of
turning deconstruction on its head, he asserts that difference is “seen the
right way up”130 as affirmation, but a fully realized differential affirmation
would affirm both ways of seeing, both top-down and boom-up, though it
has been efficacious to emphasize one or the other at different moments of a
metadialectical process.
e privileging of the One, and the negative opposed to it in a
monocentric identity, began to be articulated by Plato, though the
polytheism still evident in Heraclitus is also conserved in Plato and Plotinus,
requiring the lineage of Aristotle, the medieval solastics, and the
Enlightenment rationalists almost completely to suppress this pluralistic
multiplicity. e long privileging of monocentric rationality can be
recognized, aer the deconstruction of logocentrism especially over the last
half-century, as a dialectical necessity luring the reemergence of a
polytheistic pluralism especially developed by Selling, Nietzse, Jung,
Deleuze, and Hillman, with Jung and Hillman particularly enabling an
overcoming of the negation of the negative as an instrumental necessity for
the differentiation of a novel mode whi integrates all potencies in their
complexly contrasting relationality. is mode differentiates between an
active negative force embodied in the “non-being”131 of Plato’s Sophist and
the mere surface effect of a passive negation subordinated to identity. is
differentiation leads not to the suggestion that Deleuze was simply wrong
about the negative (nothing about Deleuze is simple), whi has indeed
tended to be subordinated to identity and the absolute in the philosophical
tradition constituting Whitehead’s “footnotes to Plato,”132 but to the
recognition that Deleuze’s oppositional relation to the privileging of
oppositionality has been a paradoxical necessity ultimately leading to a
deemphasis of the identical and the negative rather than to their impossible,
self-deconstructing negation.
Deleuze contends that the alternative since Plato has generally been
between the grounding of negation in a positive non-being or the
illusoriness of an ungrounded negation, a false binary whi can be
dissolved in the recognition that there is no absolute, originary ground, but
that differential relationality provides a more profound kind of grounding
whi overcomes the opposition between Being as either grounded or
ungrounded. As with all su persistent binary distinctions, this is a verbal
construction whi reality exceeds and contains as a limiting, instrumental
constraint that is efficacious in one phase of a process of becoming but that
fades into the baground at a more profound, higher-order phase of
ingression. Becoming is lured toward indiscernible domains intimated as
both the “celestial beyond” and the “infernal and unfathomable”133 depths,
whi are immanent conceptions of virtual potentialities exceeding the
present horizon of conception requiring constructive elicitation, rather than
transcendent realms, with the concept of the virtual derived from Bergson
explicitly associated with the concept of spirit.134
Beyond or beneath what Deleuze discerns as the monocentric circular
repetition of the Hegelian dialectic, he advocates instead a decentered
dialectic derived from Nietzse’s eternal return, a “dialectic of existence,”135
an infinite polycentric repetition of virtual potentialities across scale, for
whi he reappropriates the word Ideas, variously actualized as
transcendental images, functions, and concepts, and for whi the
differences in ea temporal repetition are selected and affirmed as
elaborations and becomings in actuality of relational dynamisms, a
pluralism of monadic “points of view.”136 is deeper dialectic is constituted
in a shedding of habitual monotony, whi fades into the baground, as
“forgeing as a force is an integral part of the lived experience of eternal
return,”137 a precondition for the differentiation of novel integrations. Texts
that engage with the history of philosophy, whi Deleuze nominates “a
spiritual voyage,”138 are enactments of this repetition with difference, careful
retracings of earlier texts in novel contexts and from different vantages to
draw out inconsistencies, implications, refinements, and extrapolations from
partially subjective presuppositions. is philosophical activity not only
requires rigorous aentiveness, but also a strategic, positive forgeing,
mythologically figured by the river Lethe flowing through the underworld of
Hades, with Deleuze invoking Dionysus “as the god of places of passage and
things of forgeing.”139 Positive forgeing cavalierly liberates thinking from
a dogmatic adherence to an original text’s specific formulations in order to
allow philosophy to begin anew, to produce a more differentiated integration
of the mode of thought embodied in the text under consideration with the
modes of thought with whi the writer is bringing this text into dialogue,
embodied both in other texts and in the philosopher’s particular bodily
experience. is differential repetition, “the thought of the future,”140 does
not only take place in “the head,” whi Deleuze describes as the “organ of
exange,” the complexly negotiated legislative emphasis and selection of
discrete logical and conceptual nominative elements, but in “the heart,”
whi is “the amorous organ of repetition,”141 the erotic lure that draws us to
repeat certain dramatic narrative complexes, oen involving disparate
imaginal persons. Eros lures us to feel our way into these virtual potencies,
these “spiritual entities”142 whi appear to us as miraculous, transgressive,
and even divine interventions from a domain that exceeds the current
horizons of our verbally mediated conceptual systems.
 One is hard-pressed not to associate these singular virtual potencies with
Jung’s most mature conception of the aretypes, especially as prolonged by
Hillman, and despite Deleuze’s critiques of the aretypes, whi seem to be
directed primarily toward their conception in Jung’s early and middle
periods.143 Ideas can be discerned in the passages between actual
occurrences, in the differential movements of higher or deeper immanent
domains that exceed these spatial indications, and whi are only
adequately describable through more abstract topologies, and through
evocative, poetic, and even ironically humorous language. Repetition is the
engine of becoming, a decentered, tortuous circular movement, a
multiplicitous intertwining of nomadic spirals, whi willfully forges
beyond the merely habitual laws and fixed cycles of nature to the liberated
domain of the Overman, “the form that results from a new relation between
forces,”144 including the cosmic forces of A Thousand Plateaus. is
conception of differential repetition might as well be a description, in its
most complex valence, of Jungian synronicity, whi enacts the expression
of relational aretypal complexes through diaronic and synronic
repetitions whose differences introduce novelty into actuality.145 As with the
aretypes, repetition reunites the opposites of singular and universal,
lawfulness and its transgression, integrations whi can only be
intellectually approaed through paradox, but whi are contained in the
mythical potencies and their narrative relations that permeate Deleuze’s
thought as mu as that of Selling, Nietzse, Jung, and Hillman.146
Deleuze discerns anatos, the Freudian death instinct posited as a
complement to the mythologically expressed potencies of Eros and Oedipus
(despite what Deleuze portrays as Freud’s reductive oppositionality and
materialism147), as “a transcendental principle”148 that constitutes the
affirmation of repetition in the form of a mythical agency exceeding any
actual expression, luring the faculties of thought and imagination.149
anatos is “a positive, originary principle”150 embodying the negative, an
insight whi recalls Nietzse’s evocation of Zarathustra as the “the
opposite of a no-saying spirit” who nevertheless “says ‘no,’ does ‘no’ to
everything people previously said ‘yes’ to.”151 e dissolution and cure of
this paradox, whi troubled both Nietzse and Deleuze, can be found in
the transformative underworld “voyage to the boom of repetition,”152
figured in the realm of Tartarus far below even Hades, to encounter the
demonic figure of Kronos, the positive potency of the negative, who enables
our healing by making us ill, generates the precondition for our liberation by
enaining and destroying us, saves us through loss.153 We eternally return
to this aretypal situation, and all of the others encountered in
mythological narratives, in a polyrhythmic temporality constituted in the
intertwining periodic repetitions of these relational complexes, ea
differentiated point in a nonlinear series resonating intensively with other
“privileged instants,”154 for whi becoming is located not in the linear
succession of events aracteristic of efficient causation, a surface effect of a
deeper mode, but in the differential novelties transversally generated from
the accumulating repetitions of the various aretypal episodes dramatizing
relational potencies.
at whi undergoes the repetition, the originary differential grounding
of the eternal return, is not discerned in any of the particular differential
instances, but in a “secret subject,” a singularity whi Deleuze describes as
a “repetitious soul” or “Self,”155 capitalized like the Self of Jungian
individuation,156 a term whi Deleuze also employs, partially derived from
Simondon, who also at least partially derived it from Jung.157 is Self is
discerned not in the particular instances of differential repetition, but in the
movement of becoming that passes wave-like, in a manner reminiscent of
Bergson, through these repetitions of dramatic situations, enacting a novel
“Copernican revolution”158 in whi discrete identities are reconceived as
moving durations in a more profound differential process of becoming
constituting a deeper form of identity, and thus perhaps a deeper form of the
negative. It is hubris, the will to overcome the constraints of present
givenness by means of the dangerous and excessive elicitation of differential
novelty, that generates transformation, enacting the creation of “the superior
form”159 of the Overman, the becoming of potencies that express themselves
through this individuating process, enacting an “active forgeing”160 of
denial whi liberates from habitual constraints to allow for the ingression
of potentiality into increasingly expansive domains of affirmative actuality.
Deleuze’s differential ontology is closely related to the calculus, and to the
questions about infinity and the infinitesimal that animate the contrasting
forms of this mathematical instrument, for whi he discerns the Leibnizian
approa as carrying us beyond the opposition between the calculus as “a
language of essences” on the one hand, a symbolic systematization of the
traditional conception of the Ideas, and “a convenient fiction”161 on the
other, a narrative mathematical construction whi allows for the analysis of
previously intractable problems. Deleuze’s conception serves to integrate
these two modes in the imaginal relationality of transcendental Ideas,
expressed in the monadic singularities of both “physical points and
metaphysical points or points of view.”162 However, although Deleuze’s
conception of difference is mu closer to that of Leibniz than to that of
Newton, he is critical of the aempt whi he discerns in Leibniz, and later
in Hegel, to “conquer the obscure” in the infinite through representation, by
making again-present the infinitely small in the case of Leibnizian analysis,
and the infinitely large in the case of Hegelian sublation, by rendering these
indiscernible domains intelligible through a totalizing system, the
optimization hypothesis for Leibniz and the identity of opposites in the
absolute maximum for Hegel. ese are aspects of the two philosophers’
systems that can be conceived as inessential to their more profound
conceptions, a recognition whi clears space for discerning the
syncategorematic repetition lured toward an always-receding horizon
eternally pursued to “the ‘nth’ power”163 by means of increasingly fine
differentiations enabling increasingly expansive and subtle integrations.
Deleuze describes the pioneering efforts of Leibniz and Hegel to create a
differential philosophy by mastering the infinite within a representational
enclosure as “causing a lile of Dionysus’s blood to flow in the organic veins
of Apollo,”164 constructing an opening from the pure privileging of
Apollonian rationality, but requiring a further shi of emphasis enacting not
only a blood transfusion in whi Apollo remains the primary actor, but a
more intensive integration in whi Apollo and Dionysus learn to speak
ea other’s languages. e aotic, affective, creative multiplicity of the
Dionysian would thus renew and transform the ordered unity of the
Apollonian, whi would in turn grant consciousness and actuality to the
Dionysian. is mutual transformation of these powers requires the
intoxicated obscurity and deathly descent of the Dionysian as mu as the
clarity and ascent of the Apollonian to be reborn as a novel mode whi
recognizes that no maer how ingenious and intricate a system we construct
through religion, science, or philosophy, the “in-itself”165 can never be
tamed, always eluding our grasp. Deleuze describes Leibniz as closer than
Hegel to “the Dionysian shores,”166 though he remains on the seas of a pure
reason, a paradoxical image for whi the ungrounding differential ground
is expressed as the solid earth while the traditional, rationalist mode is
implicitly located in the fluid ocean with its unfathomable depths, a moment
in Deleuze’s text whi seems to deconstruct itself, as the Dionysian is not a
grounding where one can rest, but an always-unseling aotic multiplicity
roiling beneath the rational, exceeding conscious systematization. is
paradox may serve to reveal that Deleuze is, in some uerances, enacting a
mere reversal of the privileging of the Apollonian over the Dionysian so that
the monstrous cruelty of the Dionysian itself is implicitly rendered as a
comforting ground, a reversal whi has nevertheless been necessary for
producing a differentiated integration of these potencies, copiously
expressed by Deleuze in this text, though with the generative inconsistency
of a true pioneer.
We must go beyond the mode of conceptual thought aracteristic of
Euclidean geometry, whi both Plotinus and Spinoza employed in their
work (despite Deleuze’s admiration for both of these philosophers), to a
mode that corresponds with the Riemannian differential geometry upon
whi Einstein built his general theory of relativity.167 Deleuze posits this
mathematical and conceptual mode as resonant with “differenciation” in
biology, the relatively discontinuous actualization of novel entities, whether
in cells enabling the emergence of more complex multicellular organisms, or
in the integral derivation of global structures in a topological manifold from
differentiated local behaviors. Integral differenciation is an “ideal
relation,”168 a relationality of Ideas among the mathematical, conceptual, and
biological domains, as well as among physical, meanical, emical,
psyic, social, linguistic, and aesthetic systems, a resonance repeated
differentially across scale. e potentialities repeated in this extrapolation of
the differential calculus are oen figured as mythologically expressed
powers, not only of Dionysus and Apollo, but of the numerous personified
potencies employed by Deleuze, “a plurality of centres”169 ea enacting a
diaronic durational coexistence, multiple complexly intertwining non-
identical series of moments, in the synronistic repetition of the eternal
return rather than the monocentric circular repetition of a single convergent
series oen aracteristic of the philosophical lineage streting from Plato
to Hegel.
is lineage has been developed and refined through an orthodox “image
of thought,”170 an imaginal construction of what it means to think
philosophically constituted in the specific contextual contours defining the
purpose and method of su an activity, a self-enclosed system of
presuppositions that produces certain kinds of concepts whi iteratively
confirm the image of thought based upon the initial premises, circulating
through monocentric binaries. e philosophical tradition descended from
Plato assumes the “good will”171 of philosophers, that philosophers are
primarily motivated by the desire to understand, to seek the truth. And
while it seems evident that most philosophers are at least partially motivated
by curiosity and the urge toward greater understanding, it is also evident
that there are other competing motivations that serve greatly to complicate
this monocausal image of philosophical activity, including career
advancement, sociality, prestige, financial security, ego-gratification, self-
justification, revenge, pleasure, dominance, and control, motives whi can
never be entirely disentangled from the putatively pure love of wisdom. And
even if philosophers were motivated primarily by the desire for truth, this
image of thought is intimately bound up with the avoidance and rejection of
error, the negative of truth whi affirms their identity, in order to discover
solutions to intractable problems. is image is exemplified in the rationalist
mode of thought aracteristic of the analytic tradition whi tends to
assume that, if ingenious enough logical arguments can be marshaled in the
court of judgment, discrete positions or sools of thought defending
“singular propositions arbitrarily detaed from their context” will be able to
triumph over their adversaries in a “puerile and artificial”172 legislative
vindication of a superior morality whi assumes the identity of the Good
and the True. is conception of philosophy as an either-or legislation of
truth and morality, the tertium non datur of reductively virtuous truth and
sinful falsity, whi finds its peak expression in Cartesian “good sense or
common sense,”173 is a still-pervasive presupposition that all of the thinkers
explicated in these pages have seen beyond to some extent and at various
points, in both the reconciliation of opposites, whi found its peak
expression in the Hegelian dialectic, and in the more expansive, profound,
and pluralist integration of difference, whi recognizes the partial,
contextual validity of all modes of thought that possess some efficacy in
actuality.
Deleuze rejects this orthodox image of thought in his overturning of
Platonism and his sustained denouncement of Hegel, in a revaluation of all
values derived from Nietzse, a critique directed against this classic mode’s
presuppositions and postulates. It is an aempt to do without images, a
mode of thought whi Deleuze recognizes is profoundly paradoxical,
though we might see that su a rejection, like deconstruction, still
participates in the very image of thought it seeks to reject. Even the
obstinate assertion of paradox is itself an image of thought, the image of the
transgressive mercurial, Promethean trister, so that even if this rejection is
partially erroneous, su denouncement cannot be finally dismissed because
error “is an integral part of the work.”174 In a 1982 leer, Deleuze
anowledges that “Bergson has convincingly shown” that “images have an
existence independently of us,”175 emphasizing in Matter and Memory that
images cannot ultimately be escaped, a recognition whi Deleuze expresses
when he writes that “true repetition takes place in imagination,”176 so that
the mode he is advocating takes images as its medium of activity, and
Deleuze’s denouncement of images in some parts of Difference and
Repetition enacts a differentiating reversal whi allows a novel, more
liberated and creative conception of the imaginal to emerge elsewhere in the
same text. Recognizing the necessity of Deleuze’s paradoxical inconsistency
as pushing thought to its limits in an intentional transgressive Dionysian
madness that exceeds mere error may lead us to a shi of emphasis in whi
what is good in the tradition streting from Plato to Hegel is retained, a
conservation toward whi Deleuze gestures, but whi he inconsistently
implements, while allowing for a further development of that mode of
thought. is novel mode can be partially described as a discontinuous leap
into an emergent domain that liberates thought from fixed images, requiring
conceptions beyond existing categories, but also as a continuous
development of the classic image of thought, retaining and building upon
that image as an essential element in the thought of the future’s constitution,
whi is ultimately grounded precisely in the problematic relationality of
images.
e emergence of this novel mode of thought, the Nietzsean “creation
of new values,” is not primarily discerned in a linear developmental series,
though it becomes generally more prevalent over historical time, but in the
privileged moments that constitute the differential repetitions of this novel
mode, whi can be found, though oen intermiently and inconsistently, in
all of the texts discussed above. e horizontal temporality of efficient
causation can be reconceived as a thread curving ba upon itself in a
knoy, decentered eternal return, and the points where this thread intersects
with itself constitute vertical formal repetitions of a “forever new” mode of
relation whose temporally successive affirmations trace a series of durations
that leap across discontinuous intervals, embodied in the conceptual
personae of privileged souls and the novel expressions they enact. e new
values are thus carried increasingly into actuality, though this development
is enacted through a nonlocal diaronic series that exceeds linear
temporality, “even if a certain amount of empirical time was necessary for
this to be recognised,” for the novel mode progressively differentiated
through transversal repetitions to become increasingly embraced and
inhabited in historical time. is formal becoming exceeding linear
temporality expresses “powers” that derive “from an unrecognised and
unrecognisable terra incognita,”177 whi can be conceived as located just
beyond the always-receding horizon of verbally and imaginally constructed
discernibility, and whi we encounter in actuality as figures that are
engaged with not only intellectually and conceptually, but “in a range of
affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering.”178
ese affective encounters with imaginal potencies force us to think in
new ways, to create novel concepts, a mode of relation whi Deleuze
describes as a “transcendental empiricism,”179 an aesthetic, imaginal, and
intuitive mode closely related to Spinozan intuition, Sellingian
metaphysical empiricism, Jamesian radical empiricism, Bergson’s intuitive
method, what Stengers designates as Whiteheadian speculative empiricism,
and the aretypal empiricisms of Jung and Hillman. Particularly associating
transcendental empiricism with Bergson and Whitehead,180 Deleuze
describes this mode as discerning an integrated intermeshing of differential
intensities complementary to the extensities susceptible to materialist and
scientific modes of thought. Encompassing the modes whi exceed logical
rationality, this multivalent relationality is the experiential domain where
creative, formal repetitions more profound than the mere habit of efficient
causation take place, as repetition occurs in the affective, intuitive, aesthetic,
and imaginal discernment, novel construction of, and immediate encounter
with Ideas in their resonant multiplicity of signs, masks, and disguises.
Transcendental empiricism enacts the paradoxical faculty whi allows us to
discern the indiscernible and to think the unthinkable beyond the current
doxa by imaginally and affectively intimating series of events whose
trajectories describe the potent becomings beyond the local and linear series
of efficient causation. is mode of relation is transcendental because,
although it allows process continually to transcend itself through the
ingression of novel differentiations and integrations, this transcendence is an
activity and not a location, as it does not discern “objects outside the
world,”181 but actualizes immanent virtual potentialities whi reside
nonlocally in the interstices of a conceptual and affective horizon, a domain
of inexhaustible powers whi have not yet been elicited through novel
verbal or aesthetic constructions, the “other dimension”182 of the eternal
return whi can be envisaged as orthogonal to the familiar degrees of
spatiotemporal freedom.
In this transcendental domain, Logos is discovered not primarily in the
“indefinite nominal regress”183 of a propositional logic aracteristic of
wrien language, but in the imaginal “transcendent language”184
aracteristic of hieroglyphs, a figurative language of Ideas beyond the
dualities of sense and nonsense, of subject and object, of affirmation and
negation, whi indicates “a transcendent limit,”185 and whi can only be
constructively elicited through the differential repetitions of potencies at an
always-receding horizon, syncategorematically carried to the nth power. e
duality between the ego and the dynamisms whi realize themselves
through us, of whi we are particular expressions in actuality, is overcome
in a new Cogito, “a Cogito for a dissolved self,”186 whi recognizes that our
individual self-conception is not an originary proposition, but a continually
negotiated differential relation with the repeated potencies luring us toward
further becomings. Ego enacts the “infinite regress” of “I think that I think
that I think… ,”187 asymptotically approaing the figure of the central,
unified identity of “Ego = Ego”188 embodied in the alemical Sol and the
Apollonian, so that we may shed the exclusivist monotheism of
consciousness in the recognition that this solar ego enacts one potency
among others and that “I is already an other,”189 as Deleuze evokes Rimbaud.
Deleuze writes that “the Gods are dead but they have died from laughing, on
hearing one God claim to be the only one,”190 and it is this overcoming of
monotheistic consciousness, the binary identity of God and ego, that
Deleuze and Guaari elaborated over the decades subsequent to Difference
and Repetition in relation to sizophrenia, and whi Hillman explicates in
his evocation of a polytheistic psyology for whi “pathologizing” is a
primary method for bringing the potencies exceeding egoic consciousness
into the solar light of conscious awareness. As Deleuze writes, “repetition is
pathos and the philosophy of repetition is pathology,”191 drawing out these
intertwined personified figures from the nocturnal, subterranean
unconscious through the imaginal, affective, and intuitive methods of
ecstatic animism, tragic art, active imagination, and Deleuzoguaarian
sizoanalysis. ese methods oen appear to the monocentric
consciousness dominant in modernity as madness, though “this pagan
world,” as Deleuze observes in a 1978 text cowrien with Fanny Deleuze,
“despite everything, remained alive and continued to live deep in us with all
its strength.”192 Pathologizings serve to produce a “fractured I” whi
“constitutes the discovery of the transcendental,”193 the polycentric domain
of virtual Ideas circulating between I and other in a transformative eternal
return leading toward an overcoming of the present mode of human
existence in the Overman, for whi “the gods of a religion, for example,
Jupiter, Mars, irinus, incarnate elements and differential relations,”194 as
he writes in 1972.
is virtual domain can be conceived as a theater, a “mystical game”195 in
whi the various potencies are actors wearing masks and disguises,
dramatizing the relationality of Ideas, like Physis and Psye, the proper
names for the figures of nature and soul, through the individuating
repetitions of narrative situations whi exceed the abstract movement of
concepts that Deleuze portrays as culminating in the Hegelian dialectic. It is
these tragic and comic repetitions of scenarios that introduce novelty into
history, and whi always approa a “terrible esoteric knowledge,”196 not as
a mere representation of eternal Forms, but as the becoming-actual of virtual
potentialities not only conceivable as abstract conceptual relations but,
perhaps even more efficaciously, as transcendental relations of personified
potencies – of gods, heroes, and demons. e infinite esoteric recognition
that the tragic heroes are always striving toward, but whi they never
aain in its totality, permeates and impregnates the dramatic play of
signifying powers, so that the egoic protagonist of human life is ceaselessly
negotiating and enacting the dynamic interrelation of these transcendental
potencies. Even modern art becomes “a theatre where nothing is fixed, a
labyrinth without a thread” because “Ariadne has hung herself,”197 a
disturbing anowledgment of the repression of these potencies in
modernity, a death of the mythological dynamisms whi has enabled us to
overcome the conception of these powers as transcendent Forms or
agencies.198 Deleuze writes elsewhere, perhaps in a Jungian vein, that
“Ariadne is the Anima, the Soul”199 constituted in “affective movements,”200
and the death of the Anima precedes a rebirth, toward whi Deleuze
gestures, into a novel mode of relation allowing a metamorphosis of the
gods as transcendental potencies, dramatically enacted in the marriage of
Ariadne and Dionysus, whose union is the eternal return producing the
Overman. is mode recognizes that we can never escape the labyrinth of
immanence, but that we can learn joyfully to navigate its contours, and even
construct new passages by means of a transcendental empiricism.
In this labyrinthine theater, the masks, disguises, and costumes are not
merely surface appearances of potencies already existing fully realized in
some eternal transcendent realm, but “integral and constituent”201 elements
of their being, whi is constituted in the nonlocal, nonlinear series of
dynamic differential passages and variations between repetitions of their
dramatic enactments rather than subsisting as divine static beings inhabiting
a given ground. e being of their becoming is located in the immanent
movement between privileged moments performing an infinite regress of
masks not traceable to an originary, prior first term, an insight whi
Deleuze derives from Freud as well as Jung, though Freud subordinates
repetition to the rationalizing opposition of Ego and Id, whereas Jungian
aretypes allow for an opening to the multiplicity of difference despite, and
perhaps even because of, Jung’s sustained aention to the problem of
opposites. However, even in Freud, this opening can be glimpsed in his
rejection of his earlier hypothesis of real ildhood events, usually in
Oedipal relation with the parents, as the traumatic origin of neurosis in
favor of the imaginal fantasy expressing the judgment of anatos, though
always lured by Eros. e disguises and masks constituting the moments of
repetition, “real series whi coexist in relation to a virtual object,”202 are
repeated in the adult replaying of scenes from a remembered ildhood, as
well as in the reenactments of historical situations. ese virtual objects are
symbols and simulacra, so that reality can be conceived as a dramatic play
of images in formal series operating transversally across linear successions.
Like the arbitrary and radically variable leers that constitute words and
sentences, they only acquire meaning through their infinite combinations,
and the actual content emerges from their relationality enabled by the
intertwined potentialities of the individual elements, a content whi is
nowhere to be found in these monadic elements, but only in their narrative
construction from a differential “alphabet of what it means to think.”203
Although Deleuze obliquely critiques Aristotle’s conception of formal
causes, this critique is not a mere rejection of formal causation, but a
deepening of this causal mode partially derived from Spinoza and Leibniz,
an expression of it in terms of difference and repetition rather than origin
and participation. Deleuze does not merely reject this mode of thought any
more than he merely rejects Plato, but he creates concepts and language to
carry the trajectory of formal causation to a deeper register, as he does with
the dialectic, in whi the persistent problem of universals is reconceived as
the shadow of a more profound differential repetition of Ideas. Deleuze’s
views on causation can, at first glance, appear ambiguous and even
incoherent as, for instance, he sympathetically articulates Spinoza’s rejection
of final causes in some texts, but he expresses the teleological views of
Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Bergson, and Whitehead with equal sympathy
elsewhere. However, in what seems to be a fairly definitive summation of
his views on causation, he suggests in Foucault that four of the folds of the
outside whi constitute the inside “are like the final or formal cause, the
acting or material cause of subjectivity or interiority as a relation to
oneself,”204 four ways of constructing process. Deleuze is evidently forging
toward a constructive mode of thought whi neither affirms nor denies the
ultimate truth of either of the opposed views of final or formal causation,
but rather positions them, and causation in general, as useful fictions that
elicit certain domains of process but inevitably neglect others. In a 1956
essay on Bergson, he writes that “finality, causality, possibility are always in
relation to the thing once it is complete,”205 and putatively opposed causal
modes are integrated in the recognition that causes do not exist in reality
independent of their enactment, but are rather retroactive narrative
constructions with real but limited efficacy. is epistemological perspective
can be extended to ontology, rendering epistemology practically
indistinguishable from ontology, as knowing itself is a constructive
elicitation of becoming from the potentialities and constraints of
process.206And again in Foucault, Deleuze similarly discusses an “immanent
cause,” whi “is realized, integrated and distinguished by its effect,”207 so
that his entire career is aracterized by the creation of novel conceptual
modes for thinking about how things happen, constructions whi unstiffen
the dominance of the Aristotelian causal quaternity coercing either the
affirmation or negation of ea kind of causation. All four modes of
causation can be understood as partially valid immanent expressions rather
than forces that reside in a transcendent domain, verbal approximations for
deeper potencies that can be envisaged just at an always-receding horizon of
conception, where the rigid distinctions between material and formal
causation, between efficient and final causation, become folded, fractally
involuted, opening out onto one another through complexly intertwined
circulations in more expansive topological domains.
Overturning and renewing formal causation in a more profound register,
Deleuze derives the concept of the virtual from Bergson as the differential
relations whi become actual, though whereas the possible is opposed to
the real, both virtuality and actuality are reality in different forms.208 He
returns to the virtual potencies again and again, describing them variously
as Ideas, simulacra, phantasms, problems, questions, multiplicities, mythical
figures, and gods, so that his critique of the Jungian aretypes seems to be
responding to an earlier conception of those formal potentialities as
psyological categories or universal essences rather than the more subtle
conception expressed in Jung’s late period (though Jung was inconsistent
about their ontological status), and refined by many Jungians, perhaps most
notably Hillman. is critique may also serve to produce a strategic
distancing from Jung’s work, as perhaps the majority of solars who affirm
the aretypal mode of thought are considered primarily to be Jungians, an
association whi tends to preclude allegiance to other sools of thought
despite Jung’s objections. Jung’s authority is immense and overwhelming in
certain circles, and it has oen been difficult for theorists to engage
affirmatively with his concepts without being designated as solely
proponents of the Jungian sool, as satellites in his orbit, rather than as
original thinkers in their own right. e list of theorists who have managed
to avoid this subsumption is relatively small, including (though certainly not
limited to) Baelard, Simondon, Gebser, Hillman, and perhaps most
successfully, Deleuze, both with and without Guaari, as his engagement
with Jungian concepts is so subtle and complex that it can easily be
overlooked if one is not already immersed in Jungian thought. However,
there is a common recognition of numerous resonances between Jung and
Deleuze among readers of one who subsequently read the other (intentional
in the case of Deleuze), whi may serve to lure both Jungians and
Deleuzeans out of their oen provincial enclosures to engage with both
theorists in novel ways that serve to overcome the tendency toward
dogmatic orthodoxy evident in relation to any great thinker, however
heterodox their thought. One of the most profound resonances between
them can be discerned in Deleuze’s evocation of gods and mythical figures
as expressions of the virtual potentialities around whi he repetitiously
circles, drawing out the nuances of these dynamisms under their multiple
designations.
e introduction to Deleuze’s 1955–56 seminar, What Is Grounding?, was
not recorded, though we know that he initiated his first lecture by referring
to “the foundational heroes of mythology,”209 of whom Odysseus is the only
one named. It is appropriate that the first moment of Deleuze’s first seminar
for whi there is a record, and whi Kerslake nominates “the ur-text for
Deleuze’s pre-1970s philosophy,”210 is absent, indiscernible, only alluded to,
so that this originary act must be imaginally extrapolated from the rest of
the text, as this is precisely how he describes the figures of mythology in the
extant notes. ese figures are imaginal, symbolic variables for the “infinite
task” with whi mythology faces us, questions that are always pursued but
never answered in their fully realized totality, just as saying “I love you”211
is not a conclusion but a commitment to an open-ended devotion. e
primary example Deleuze offers of an infinite task is that of the
“superhumans,” presumably of Greek mythology, drinking an unnamed
beverage, presumably nectar or ambrosia, that produces their immortality
and renders them gods (as in the assumption of Heracles discussed by
Plotinus212), a transformative activity whi he describes as “trying to live a
symbol.” e purpose of these infinite tasks is thus discerned in the ritual
commitment to continually imbibing the symbolic, whi lures privileged
souls toward an always-pursued divine domain in a way that exceeds both
the linearity aracteristic of efficient causation and a reductive cynicism
about this becoming-gods, whi Deleuze describes as “anti-
philosophical.”213 is symbolic, god-making beverage is encountered in
affective experience, whi only becomes the “natural ends”214 of philosophy
with the emergence of conceptual reason, though the gods and mythological
heroes accessible to the imagination always lurk behind these ends in the
“cosmic dimension”215 of repetition and the eternal return. As we approa
this ground, whi Deleuze will later conceive as the ungrounding ground of
difference, the sphinx poses an ambiguous question and the oracle makes an
obscure prediction, evocative riddles and enunciations whi lead one
further toward what will later be described as an infinite regress, whi
must be brought “closer to the mythological notion”216 in order to produce
novel modes of understanding.
Deleuze spends several pages in Difference and Repetition discussing
Plato’s dialectical “method of division” in The Statesman, whi the Eleatic
Stranger claims is a method of distinguishing between truth and falsity, a
claim that undermines itself by the unexpected introduction of a mythical
mode of discourse into the progression of increasingly specific and minute
binaries, complicating the oppositional mode with a mythical narrative
concerning “the image of an ancient God.”217 e Stranger describes this
myth as a “great story” involving an “element of play” in the reconfiguration
of the heavens themselves, a cosmic reversal of the animating circulations
enacted by this unnamed ancient god marking the transition from the age of
Kronos to the age of Zeus. In this kairotic enantiodromia, the gods “let go in
their turn the parts of the cosmos that belonged to their arge,” effecting an
epoal transformation whi the Stranger describes as “the greatest and the
most complete turning of all,” suggesting that during su a reversal, “the
greatest anges also occur for us who live within the universe,”218 enacting
a necessary destruction and renewal. Similarly, in the Phaedrus, when
Socrates is discussing the different types of madness, prefiguring Deleuze’s
expression of the philosophy of difference as pathology, he finds it necessary
to refer again to a myth, that of the repetitious “circulation of souls,” in order
to differentiate among the Ideas that they express. Deleuze rejects Aristotle’s
aracterization of these moments in Plato as a mere regression to a
mythical mode, as for Deleuze, the distinction between myth and dialectic in
Plato dissolves in the “true method” whi “overcomes this duality and
integrates myth into the dialectic,” making “myth an element of the dialectic
itself.” In his overturning of Plato, Deleuze finds the way beyond the
oppositional dialectic, carried to its highest expression by Hegel, in an
integration of a mythical, imaginal, polytheistic mode with dialectical logic.
is “so-mysterious method”219 is the eternal return, in whi lots are
distributed to ea soul in the form of complex potencies, describable as the
relations among gods, leaping between singularities, whi it is ea soul’s
“destiny”220 differentially to elaborate over the course of their lives in the
dramatic repetition of dynamic enactments, though Deleuze teases apart this
“story-repetition”221 from its Platonic grounding in transcendent Forms to
resituate the repetition of these narratively organized dynamisms in a
relational, differential grounding describable in mythical terms.
In a strikingly similar conception, Jung writes that “the aretypes, like all
numinous contents, are relatively autonomous, they cannot be integrated
simply by rational means, but require a dialectical procedure” oen
expressed “in the form of mythological motifs.”222 Prolonging this
integrating Jungian mythical dialectic, Deleuze suggests that it is never the
gods themselves who are encountered, as “the gods are only the forms of
recognition,”223 an infinite regress of masks within masks whi can only be
asymptotically approaed, and whi we encounter as demons, angelic
sign-bearers, and various other powers, in the imaginal, conceptual, and
always-multiple expressions of transcendental Ideas, simulacra, problems,
and questions. Even in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, published a year aer the
mythologically permeated Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1963, Deleuze evokes
Plato’s recognition in the Politics of the provisional necessity of laws, and
thus of the Kantian image of philosophy as legislation, as “only a ‘second
resort,’ ” a locum tenens “in a world deserted by the gods,”224 so that
Deleuze’s primary impulse to replace “the system of judgment” with
“something else,” whi he was still affirming in the late seventies, would
partially be aieved through an ultimately complex and enigmatic renewal
of “the system of the gods” explicated by Selling.
In his radical revision of the Platonic conception of Ideas as eternal,
essential Forms located in a static transcendent ground, Deleuze
reformulates them as “demonic” and “divine” virtual, differential dynamisms
whi create their own space and time through the repetitious unfoldings of
their relational potentialities in actuality, whi are always other than
themselves because there is no originary identity that they represent, as they
are constituted in the very movement through the differential disguises
whi can only syncategorematically approa singularities at an always-
receding horizon. e two forms of dialectic Deleuze enunciates are the
“bare repetition”225 of the Platonic Ideas as exterior, surface effects of the
interior repetition clothed in an infinite regress of costumes and masks in
the depths, though this more “profound repetition” is also prefigured in
Plato, allowing for the self-deconstructive overturning of Platonism through
concepts derived from Plato himself, who intimated his own overcoming in
an “anti-Platonism at the heart of Platonism.”226Deleuze describes
established concepts, whether Ideas and formal causation, aretypes and
synronicity, or even difference and repetition themselves (extrapolating to
our time), as ultimately bloing the deeper form of repetition in their
eventual reification of orthodoxy and the hegemony of general laws. It is the
encounter with the other in the form of symbols and signs that allows for
the creation of novel concepts through the devouring and reconstitution of
orthodox categories in the mythical and imaginal domain of the interior,
Dionysian depths accessible to an affective, intuitive, and aesthetic
empiricism. is aotic interior labyrinth is discernible in the dramatic play
of singular potencies whose presence always exceeds the representation of
laws and concepts that have already been constructed, allowing for the
metamorphosis of these clear and distinct categories in a discordant
symphonic integration of distinction and Dionysian obscurity, “the true tone
of philosophy.”227
is groundless virtual domain becomes accessible to a transcendental
empiricism when the disparate multiplicity of Ideas is rendered visible
through the pathological fracturing and initiatory dismemberment of the
ego, so that Ideas are coexistent potencies finding different contrasting
relational emphases in ea actual occasion, whi demand that they be
thought. ese differential potencies that think themselves in us, through us,
and as us – others in constant negotiation with our individual identities,
themselves constituting our individuality – find expression in all domains
across orders, so that the elements whi form an expression in actuality of
one Idea, quantum discontinuity for example, are repetitions of a more
expansive order, as in punctuated evolutionary saltations, a reiteration
across scale discussed by Erwin Srodinger.228 Ideas are unconscious,
residing in a potential domain that always exceeds consciousness, and they
are complexly animated in all of the faculties, not only of reason and
understanding, but of imagination, fantasy, sensibility, and sociability, whi
must be carried to their transcendental limits in a “discordant harmony.”229
While conceptual thought can serve to illuminate the unconscious virtual
domain of Ideas through the discernment of their particular repetitions and
their various modes of expression, the Ideas always exceed any particular
conceptual formulation, so that the imagination is required in order to
envisage these singular potencies in their full multiplicity across orders,
“guiding our bodies and inspiring our souls, grasping the unity of mind and
nature.”230
Whereas the clear distinction between “the thing itself”231 and simulacra
is primary in Platonism, Deleuze’s novel conception of Ideas is closely
related to a reappropriation of simulacra and phantasms, derived from
certain moments in Plato himself, as the repetition internal to the symbol.
e eternal return of potentialities is constituted in an infinite regress of
copies of copies without origin or ground, caves opening into other caves, a
dynamic, decentered, tortuously revolving spiral expressible in mythical
terms rather than a static monocentric circulation, a conversion whi
destroys the representational identity of the gods, but whi imagines their
becomings in differential relationality. e things themselves are simulacra,
so that the clear and distinct difference between reality as original model
and experience as representational image is obscured and dissolved in the
recognition that there is no “ ‘beyond’ of the world”232 outside the
immanent, an insight that Deleuze, somewhat ironically, discerns in
Hippolyte’s work on Hegel in 1954. ere are only virtual dynamisms at an
always-receding transcendental horizon, in relation to whose potentiality is
constructed the images that constitute process, including space, time, and
consciousness, a recognition that shis agency from a projected
transcendent domain to the constant negotiation between individual
subjects and virtual potencies. us, the pragmatic vehicle, whi was
transformed into a roet blasting orthogonally into space, becomes an
interstellar or transdimensional vessel rather than a structure based on solid
ground, a vehicle for whi no direction is down, for whi the static three
dimensionality presupposed by conventional directionality is problematized.
In Platonism, the simulacra and phantasms are associated with the Sophist,
the devilish enemy who must be defeated in order to ground the Ideas. But
Deleuze hears the aotic “infernal raet”233 of the Sophists and Heraclitus
beneath the cosmos of Plato, so that the distinction between the grounding
clarity of Socrates and the ungrounding relativism of the Sophists is
obscured, allowing a novel mode to gleam through this fracture in identity,
to be discovered in the dissolution of this dubious opposition, for whi the
ungrounding itself becomes a deeper kind of relational ground that is always
other than itself. e opposition between Apollonian cosmos and Dionysian
aos is dissolved in a “aosmos,”234 a portmanteau that Jung prefigures
when he writes that “in all aos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret
order.”235
A primary mode in whi the Ideas can be discerned is in persistent
problems and questions, not only encountered in the opposition between
two conflicting demands, but in incommensurable modes of thought that
seem to talk past one another, to work at cross purposes, or to be entangled
in byzantine knots. Problems are the positive elements that impel the
creative repetition of dramatic narratives in order to elaborate and work
through the differences among the actors in any particular scenario, so that
problematic Ideas are the motive factors of becoming, as without problems
and questions, the world would be a static unity requiring no response and
thus no activity. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze returns to the infinite
task posed by the mythical and the oracular discussed over a decade earlier
in What Is Grounding?. e oracle’s ambiguous response to a question is
itself problematic, prefiguring the dialectical “art of problems and
questions”236 traced from Plato’s initiatory openness to its differentiating
limitation in the oppositional negative of Hegel, and reimagined by Deleuze
in resonance with Selling, Nietzse, and Jung, who discerns that the
questions posed by the unconscious can express themselves as pathology
and madness, whi do not come without the pathos of suffering, but whi
lead through the opening of an “ontological ‘fold’ ”237 in the fractured ego to
the gods.
Deleuze implicitly refers to the passages on madness in the Phaedrus,
where Socrates affirms that “some of our greatest blessings come from
madness, when it is granted to us as a divine gi” and that “god-given
madness is beer than human sanity,” a Dionysian mode of relation beyond
mere truth and error that Deleuze associates especially with the pre-
Socratics.238 As Deleuze suggests, it is the renewal of this pre-Socratic and
Platonic insight that allowed Jung to exceed the binarity dominant in
Western thought to discover a deeper differenciation (as the complement to
differentiation), whi Deleuze renders as synonymous with integration, a
syncategorematic engagement with virtual questions, problems, and tasks
for whi ea actual answer and solution is never a final aainment of
resolution, perfection, and closure, but a provisional liberation into new
domains in the form of novel symbolic, paradoxical, problematic fields.
ese problematic potencies awaken the “superior exercise”239 of the
faculties, and serve as preconditions for the expansion of knowledge through
the contemplative process of learning by discerning the infinite series of
resonant masks and disguises luring thought toward eternally displaced
divine virtual objects at a transcendental horizon.
Deleuze thus shis the focus away from solutions and answers to
problems and questions in the concept of integral differenciation, as
solutions are always contained implicitly in the formulation of the problem,
whether mathematical, scientific, or philosophical and, as he writes in 1953,
“a philosophical theory is an elaborately developed question, and nothing
else.”240 e more profound the problematic formulation, the more profound
the solution that necessarily results from it, forming the precondition for the
formulation of deeper problems opening into more expansive affective and
conceptual domains,241 so that “ea age says everything it can according to
the conditions laid down for its statements,”242 and when an age has had its
say, it must cede to the deeper problems of a subsequent age. e calculus is
a primary example of this intimate interrelation of problems and solutions
for the modern, as it allowed ancient problems to be posed in novel ways,
whi were the precondition for their solutions. As long as problems are
formulated in terms of truth and falsity, of binary opposition, their solutions
can only take the form of a shallow affirmation of one binary option as true
and the negation of the other as mere error. Hegel’s innovation, derived
from the tradition initiated by Heraclitus and Plato, whi Deleuze
intermiently appreciates even as he denounces and overturns it, is that
problematic conflicts tend to produce an emergent unity more profound
than the opposition, so that the question becomes how the two opposed
sides can both be partial aspects of a more complete and profound truth.
Deleuze’s primary innovation on this particular conceptual complex, a novel
conception of dialectic, is to ask who the singular personified potencies are
behind problems, to ask whi transcendental Ideas, oen imagined as
mythological gods and heroes, are playing out their problematic differences
in more topologically complex dramatizations, for whi oppositional
conflict is only one kind of relation among others. He enacts a mode that
integrates the conceptual dialectic, refined over millennia, with the imaginal,
intuitive, and affective empiricism aracteristic of animism, Greek tragedy,
alemical opus, active imagination, and sizoanalysis, whi have formed
a multiple countervalent tradition to the dominant philosophical trajectories,
oen reviving pre-dialectical modes of relation. e resonant integration of
these complementary trajectories leads to a deeper form of dialectic for
whi the repetition of problems and questions indicates an always-receding
origin and horizon, the virtual, indiscernible loci of the thoroughly
reimagined formal and final causes whi take a multiplicity of forms in
singularities, Ideas, simulacra, and gods.
In Deleuze’s critique of the Hegelian negative, he asserts that “there is no
Idea of the negative,”243 that the negative is an illusory shadow of
problematic difference, and that “death cannot be reduced to negation.”244
But it may perhaps be recognized that the negative shadow is also a god,
precisely one face of the God who has been exclusively elevated in
monotheism, the father-god of weighty judgment, of totalitarian unification
and control, of hierarical binarity, of static eternal life, whi finds
identity in its opposition with the Devil, an oppositional identity prolonged
in all of the binary privilegings of a rationalism whi has reaed its peak
expression in modernity: mind and body, mind and world, male and female,
white and bla, straight and gay, good and evil, heaven and hell, One and
many, God and ego, conscious and unconscious. As discussed in relation to
Selling, this biblical God, whose name Elohim is derived from the
Phoenician god El, is an epoal development of none other than the Kronos
of Greek mythology, with whom the ancient Greeks associated El, and his
Roman counterpart in Saturn. Deleuze seems to be enacting a transitional
reversal in his rejection of the Idea of the negative, affirming all potencies
except for the one that has been dominant in the exclusivist monotheistic
epo whi seems to be nearing its death, and whi he has done as mu
as anyone to usher toward its end.
He is partially right, in that Kronos is not the only power associated with
death, embodying Derrida’s final closure of the current epo, as Dionysus
also correlates with death in a different register, a creative, transformative
death and dismemberment always intimately related to a rebirth into novel
domains, a death-rebirth complex strangely intertwined, along with the
transcendent centrality of Apollo, with the Hebrew God in the Christ of the
New Testament. Deleuze thus enacts the death of the dominance of the
saturnine negative itself, issuing into the Dionysian rebirth of the gods in all
their multiplicity (rather than Christ in totalizing union with Elohim),
including El-Kronos-Saturn as one actor in a larger relational drama instead
of as the totalitarian dictator of a universal metaphysical regime grounded
in transcendence. Becoming cannot be reduced to the oppositional conflict of
negative and identity, but the deeper form of the dialectic, whi integrates
the conceptual dialectic with mythical potencies, must ultimately recognize
that the negative is also a god, but not the only one, and thus that the
binaries of rational thought, including birth and death, as well as male and
female, become problematic elements of the death-and-rebirth ordeal
imagined, for instance, in the hermaphroditic figure of the alemical
Mercurius.245 Aer the inversion and overturning that Deleuze enacts, with
the intensity “seen from below” as negative reimagined as affirmative
difference seen from “on high,”246 perhaps we can affirm even the difference
at the heart of this oppositional overturning so that both the boom-up and
top-down perspectives can be understood as containing partial validity, as
legitimately expressing different aspects of becoming.
Deleuze derives the term multiplicity from Bergson and Husserl, and
ultimately from Riemannian geometry, designating topological relations of
variables or coordinates in a multidimensional phase space, and not merely
the variety of the many, so that both the many and the one can be conceived
as potent multiplicities.247 is mode of description emphasizes the
relational quality of the Ideas as problematic complexes expressing potencies
and their nonlocal relations rather than static essences. ey are plural
networks of virtual interconnection, both mathematical and metaphysical,
that form the differential potentialities and constraints from whi the
actuality of lived experience in a particular spatiotemporal construction is
extracted through negotiation with these complex n-dimensional
dynamisms. Multiplicity is the stage on whi the drama of repetition takes
place, though this stage does not preexist the actors or their roles, but is
constituted in the reciprocal relationality of the roles themselves, for whi
opposition is one mode of topological relation among others, some of whi
correlate with dynamic structures in more expansive degrees of freedom
than the three spatial dimensions whi we can easily visualize without the
assistance of complex mathematics, and even in fractal dimensions. ese
differential multiplicities are incarnated through a Whiteheadian “adventure
of Ideas”248 in mathematical, physical, psyological, and sociological
expressions, correlated via “internal resonances,”249 a term derived from
Simondon,250 whi are real expressions of virtual potentialities in disparate
actualities. ese resonant expressions can be apprehended through a
transcendental empiricism, whi Deleuze describes not only as a Leibnizian
mathesis universalis, but also as a “universal physics, universal psyology,

and universal sociology,”251 all of whi designate the domains of efficacy

for faculties that discern actual expressions of virtual multiplicities across
heterogenous orders, Ideas whi can be recognized as gods as mu as in
the series of the calculus. e expression of Ideas requires a philosophical
style that does not merely unite the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but
continually translates between the disparate languages of clear, distinct
mathematical harmony and aotic, discordant imaginal potency.
Like the multiple designations for Ideas, whi emphasize different
aspects of these virtual potencies, Deleuze offers four different, synonymous
terms for the mode of becoming resonant with the integral calculus:
integrate, differenciate, solve, and actualize. Whereas differentiation is the
analytic determination of disparate problematic potentialities, integral
differenciation expresses those differentiated potencies through local
solutions that combine the singular dynamisms into actual occurrences,
whi not only occur in time, but condition the temporal modes in whi
events occur, and whi find a more expansive coordination in a global
integration, “the anging totality of Ideas,”252 differentiating powers in
order “to constitute functional totalities or totalities that are not given in
nature,”253 as Deleuze writes in 1953. e infinitesimal from whi the
integral calculus syncategorematically constructs curves is an interior
genetic Idea whi “overcomes the duality of concept and intuition,”254
rather than an exterior sematic rule.
 e differential potencies never aain complete, final integration in
actuality, as Ideas always exist partially as potential and partially as actual,
constituted in the iterative circulation between these two domains of reality,
a progressive, subtly teleological movement whi enacts the repetition of
variety through discordant harmony. Whereas for the Newtonian version of
the calculus, the integral is merely the inverse of the differential, for the
Leibnizian infinitesimal calculus, integration is the activity through whi
the series of differentiated potencies are expressed in actuality, though
Deleuze evidently asserts the synonymity of differenciation and integration
in order to emphasize that the solutions expressed by integration are
implicitly contained in the differential problematic formulations. e
activities of differentiation and differenciation, combined in the process of
“different/ciation,”255 are as intimately connected as the two faces of Janus,
the problems of differentiation forming the conditions for the novel creative
solutions of integration, whi in turn form the novel conditions for more
expansive and profound problematic differential formulations in deeper
dimensions, as well as their integral solutions. is decentered spiral
movement enacts the ingression of novelty from potentiality into actuality,
opening out into novel frontiers of mathematical-metaphysical activity,
including set theory and fractal geometry, whi was being discovered by
Mandelbrot at the same moment Deleuze was writing Difference and
Repetition in the late sixties, and whi he would later explore in The Fold,
and especially with Guaari in What Is Philosophy?. Differenciation leads
beyond the solely mathematical inflection of integration to the deeper form
of the dialectic, whose problems are preconditions for actual solutions not
only in mathematics, but also in physics, biology, psyology, and sociology.
e physical and biological orders are constituted in multiplicities of local
integrations, whi themselves are globally integrated in the total event of
the relation of an organism with its internal and external milieus. is
resonant series of increasingly expansive and intensive integrations “pushes
the object or living being to its own limits” in order to create novel modes of
relation, enacting a dramatic “staging at several levels” of potencies, so that
“dramatisation is the differenciation of differenciation,”256 the differentiating
global integration of local integrations through the aesthetic narrative
enactment of divine “primordial relations”257 performing the dialectical
interplay of species, individuals, organs, and particles. Two decades later,
Deleuze writes that “progressive integrations” are “initially local and then
become or tend to become global, aligning, homogenizing, and summarizing
relations between forces,”258 so that the process of integration teleologically
tends toward the increasing interiorization of contrasting differential
dynamisms, whi generates an increase in the intensity of organized
activity, and thus can potentially actualize a progressive liberation into
increasingly expansive degrees of freedom.
Psyologically, the Freudian Id, or the Dionysian unconscious, is
populated by embryonic local egos, singular dynamisms integrated from a
pre-individual field of differential intensities. e first task of the infant is to
construct from this virtual field the object of the mother, for example, in
relation to the condensed internal object of the individual self whi, in an
evidently dialectical process that circulates between the two poles, allows for
the initial differentiation of self from other, but whi becomes problematic
when the ego forged from this binary relation grows too dominant in the
internal milieu, repressing the dreaming multiplicity from whi the ego is
condensed and extracted. e plurality of voices repressed in the totalizing
constitution of the global ego expresses the virtual potencies whi must be
differentiated and integrated in a more democratic multiplicity, by means of
the Cogito for a dissolved self, in order for the gods to whom Jung returned
in his ambiguous rebellion against Freudian monotheism, a project carried
forward and rendered even more complex and subtle by Deleuze, to find
actualization in a novel integral Self. is more expansively individuated
global integration renders the ego as a first among equals rather than as a
totalitarian dictator who, like Kronos, perpetually devours his progeny.
As long as individuality is constructed as an opposition of self and other,
the projected virtual objects cannot be integrated, always generating a la,
so that a polycentric consciousness is required to overcome the binary
construction of ego and object, as “individuation is what responds to the
question ‘Who?’ ”259: who are the potencies of the Dionysian unconscious
that speak within us and through us, that constitute our complex
individuality in the interstices of the totalitarian ego?260 Deleuze writes in
1983 that “‘Who’ is always Dionysus, an aspect or a mask of Dionysus,”261
and thus “I is an other”262 expresses both a differentiation and an
integration, performing the individuation of the Self – resonant with the
Jungian conception of these terms – within whom the virtual others can
subsist as other, and who is constituted entirely from the narrative relations
of a cast of aracters, none of whom is the putatively one true self
(mirroring a one true God). Rather, the Self emerges from the dramatic
relationality of the actors expressing multiplicities, constituted in “forces and
wills” as mu as in ontologically ambiguous persons because, “at the most
profound level of subjectivity, there is not an ego but rather a singular
composition,”263 and these singularly composed cosmic forces resonate with
physical and biological Ideas through an “indi-drama-different/ciation”264
that integrates the disparate valences of integration expressed by the
concepts of individuation, dramatization, and differenciation.
ese dynamics are also operative in the order accessible to sociology, in
whi society is constituted in a multiplicity of imbricated differential
relations, not only in terms of relational identities associated with race,
gender, sexuality, age, class, religion, and ability, but in the complex
negotiations of disparate social, political, juridical, ideological, and economic
forces whi actualize the Ideas also expressed on the scales accessible to
physics, biology, and psyology. Deleuze’s critique of the binarity of the
Hegelian dialectic also applies to the Marxist class struggle, but this critique
also displays similar limitations to the critique of Hegel.265 Actual labor is
locally integrated from the differentiated multiplicity of intertwining
potencies that constitute the constantly shiing mainic flows of discourse,
desire, and material organization, whi is then globally integrated within
capitalist or communist societies, whi in turn find a literally global
integration formed from contrasting differential elements, allowing for the
emergence of novel problematic tensions, disparities, and questions whi
demand novel integrations beyond existing political and economic
categories. ese differentiating societal integrations progressively lure the
faculty of sociability toward its transcendental objects, both in the structure,
discipline, punishment, and security of the infinite regression of masks
figured by Kronos and his “societies of control,”266 but also in the
Promethean urge toward freedom through the revolutionary transgression
of boundaries, whi can be creative and liberating, but also disruptive and
shaering. And these are just two of the figures in a profuse cast of
aracters that populate the mythoi to whi Deleuze returns again and
again in the figures of Dionysus, Apollo, Ariadne, Kronos, Zeus, Athena,
Aphrodite, Ares, Artemis, Diana, Ais, Osiris, Isis, Aion, Kairos, Chronos,
Mnemosyne, Oedipus, Prometheus, Psye, Eros, Heracles, Omphale,
Odysseus, Sisyphus, Narcissus, Tantalus, and Actaeon, so that the Oedipal
dialectic of the saturnine father-judge and the Promethean rebel-son (always
involved with the maternal) is but one complex among numerous others
that demand actual expression across orders.
Deleuze recognizes the integration of series of mythological potencies
through a novel form of dialectic resonant with the Leibnizian calculus as
Selling’s primary innovation, whi allowed philosophy to go beyond
Hegel. And it is in the Neoplatonic solution to the problem of the Phaedrus,
in whi souls eternally circulate in order to differentiate ea series of
complex potentiality, that Deleuze discerns an opening from a dialectic of
opposition and identity to a deeper dialectic of repetition and difference, so
that the figure of Zeus, for example, is encountered in the differential
movement through a series of expressions of this expansive, regal potency
by means of a “method of exhaustion” whi is a direct precursor to the
calculus. is differentiation of divine powers, of whi Deleuze not only
mentions Zeus in this instance, but also Aphrodite, Ares, Apollo, and
Athena, prepares these dynamisms for integral differenciation in a mythical
dialectic incarnated through dramatic narrative relations. is narrative
relationality is a discordant harmony in whi ea of the faculties that
apprehends ea virtual potency – the erotic desire for connection
aracteristic of the “God of love” and the wrathful concentration of
directed activity aracteristic of the “God of anger”267 – finds a broader
domain of integration. e discordant relations of these potencies are
contained within a differenciating narrative harmony for whi disparate,
and oen incommensurable, powers are conceived in progressively
unfolding dramatic relations, ea human faculty pursuing its divine virtual
object by means of a series of durational enactments of its relation to other
potencies in a process of “creative actualisation,”268 whi transforms these
irreducible dynamisms through the “hidden art”269 of aesthetic narrative
discernment within or below the concept.
e process of dramatic creation is expressed in all domains across scale,
including in the writing of philosophy itself, whi Deleuze suggests should
be a mysterious fiction, like the infinitesimal, in whi the philosophical
detective ruminates on a series of clues whose ideal interrelation they
intuitively grasp, but through whi they must circulate via novel linguistic
permutations in order to aain a moment of resolution in whi the various
threads are woven together. is local integration can be further integrated
with other local integrations in order to express conceptual relations whi
have not yet been verbally constructed in actuality. ese integrations are
the solutions to the old problems, the relational system of problematic
elements carried to its inevitable dissolution, so that more profound
problems can reveal themselves and demand novel creative integrations, the
contemplative self integrating nonlocal series in more expansive and
complexly differentiated zones of activity. In its highest form, philosophy is
not merely the reproduction of answers already discovered, or the deduction
of conclusions from given premises, but the seduction of learning whi
occurs through a sustained encounter with the infinite task posed by the
other, with that whi exceeds the domain of the philosopher’s secure
conceptual possession. Writing philosophy takes place at a horizon of
aieved knowledge, verbally spiraling in upon interstitial Ideas to express
them in novel ways that allow for a decentering circulation of the total
event constituted in the relation of writer and reader, an iterative expansion
of the always-receding horizon. Aer students have made their way through
textbooks filled with the seled knowledge of their cultural epo, they
learn with philosophers by thinking with them as they learn through the
writing, itself impelled by the philosophers’ own reading, accompanying
them on the pioneering exploration of novel domains, though truly
philosophical texts can never be fully tamed but, like Heraclitus or Plato,
remain pathways luring us outward toward infinitely expansive bright vistas
and inward into tortuously labyrinthine dark forests. Philosophy is not a
mere transmission of knowledge, but an adventure of Ideas that the reader
and writer must continually embark upon together in the encounter with
problems and questions, with signs and symbols, with masks and disguises
that always lure us onward.
is adventure occurs not only in continuous progress, but in
discontinuous leaps. Like Bergson’s image of learning to swim, whi
Deleuze evokes in relation to Leibniz’s description of the sea as a
“problematic field,”270 differential relations steadily accumulate in complexly
intertwining series until an integral solution suddenly emerges and the
person standing on the shore trying to learn to swim by summing together
an always-unaainable series of infinitesimal movements crystallizes the
Ideas of the problematic unconscious in a unified will that risks a leap into
the novel domain, crossing a paradoxically uncrossable threshold where the
old problem of how to swim is solved by the act of swimming itself. But this
integrating leap creates the precondition for the more profound problems of
what to do, and of where to go, once one has entered into the novel domain.
Now that the learner has learned to swim, they must decide what kind of
swimmer they want to be: a playful splasher, a serious competitor, a placid
exerciser, a deep-sea diver exploring ever-new domains, or even an observer
on the bea who wates the swimmers with the knowledge that they too
once swam. ese are oices that occur not only in the individuation of a
single philosopher who must negotiate their relation to a novel medium, but
in the collective relation to any new domain. In order to enter a qualitatively
novel phase of its ingression, a culture must decide collectively to make the
transition, an imaginal leap whi, as Stengers describes in relation to James
and Whitehead, requires the collective “to trust that something will come to
meet it.”271 For Deleuze, this “something” is expressible as the gods, and it is
the encounters with these problematic potencies and the different languages
they speak whi fractures, dismembers, and dissolves us in an initiatory
ordeal that enacts “the very transformation of our body and our
language,”272 allowing novel affective and conceptual integrations to emerge
through our sacrifice.
A primary locus of the emergence of a novel image of thought is in the
collective construction of time, so that the overcoming of the opposition of
temporality and non-temporality, of historical and eternal, of immanent and
transcendent, is central to Deleuze’s project, an untimely philosophy whi
recognizes that the duality of particular empirical actualities and universal
transcendent Forms can be overcome in a more complex conception of time
resonant not only with Bergsonian duration, but with Jungian synronicity.
e durations whi are separated along a linear timeline by a first synthesis
of time, and rendered as real movement by a second synthesis of time, are
arranged by the third synthesis of time, the repetition of the eternal return,
in a nonlocal series, strangely looping ba upon itself to approa the Ideas
whi imaginally unfold from “an ancient mythical present”273 constituted
in eternally receding simulacra. Time in all its complexly intertwined
multivalence is constructively coerced from this deeper differential
repetition rather than repetition occurring in a preexisting time. e most
profound third synthesis of time is constituted in an internal resonance of
privileged moments, whose totality can only be approaed through a
symbolic mode of conception, expressed in the dramatic mythological acts
from whi time is elicited through differenciation, the integration of
different enactments of the narrative relations of potencies. Nietzse never
fully expressed this final synthesis, this “moment of the revelation” of the
Overman, in its actuality, but only evoked it, deferring the full articulation
of the eternal return, correlated with the dramatic death and transformative
fracturing of Zarathustra’s egoic identity, to “a future work”274 whi
Nietzse never wrote, but toward whi he cleared a path, creating the
precondition for Deleuze to bring this mode of thought further into
actuality.
e decentered temporal circulation of the eternal return requires not
merely a reconciliation of the figures on the two sides of a mirror – though
this passage through the looking glass is necessary at an earlier stage of
individuation – but a shaering of the mirror of dualism, in whi the
“narcissistic ego”275 discerns God in its own image along one axis of
reflection. e fractured I is constituted in a aotic multiplicity of mirroring
fragments reflecting one another in an always-shiing laice of potent rays
tracing lines of flight into the infinite distance, for whi the shadowy voids
between the photonic trajectories form the negative space required for
structure, not primarily as simple, oppositional negation, but as more
topologically complex contrasts in n-dimensional manifolds. It is the
constructive elicitation of this multiplicity, constituted in the relationality of
potencies more profound than a linear temporal succession, the
ungrounding relational field from whi linear temporality is extracted, that
produces “the totality of the series and the final end of time,”276 the
teleologically lured global integration of this system of series of stages
enacting the differenciation of dynamisms whi can be
syncategorematically approaed but never finally aained at an always-
receding virtual horizon.
At this univocal horizon of the future, formal potentiality becomes so
extreme and intensive that it infinitely recedes toward formlessness,
integrating both the differentiated affirmation and negation of formal and
final causation, enacting a discordant harmonization of the straight line of
linear temporality and efficient causation with its disappearance, figured as
a curve beyond the horizon into an always-indiscernible domain exceeding
formality and formlessness, in the more expansive dimension of the eternal
return’s groundless, decentered circulation. is novel conception integrates
the facilely opposed temporal conceptions differentiated through historically
correlated stages, so that the ancient cyclical time of the unconscious past
and the modern linear time of the egoic present are subsumed in the
univocal “thousand-voiced”277 integrality of the individuated future
Overman, perhaps eoing the thousand-named alemical arcane
substance. e eternal return revolves in a decentered spiral, for whi the
astronomical circulations of the planets around a fixed center imagined by
the ancients can be reconceived as tracing complexly intertwining curves
around a Sun hurtling along its own line of flight relative to far vaster
cosmic configurations, forming ideal relations across orders with the
differentiating repetition of “intensive intentionalities,”278 the dramatization
of divine potencies.
Ideal relations of material and formal becomings enacting a multiplicity
of dynamisms across orders of organization resonate with the “spiritual life”
of an individual in the form of “destiny,”279 whi operates not through the
deterministic succession of discrete durations aracteristic of efficient
causation or the fatal ends of radical finalism, but through the nonlocal
narrative resonance, repetition, and eo of signs and roles diaronically
telescoping privileged moments when singular potencies are synronically
constellated. e individual’s freedom, their “oice of existence,”280 thus
resides in a Spinozan “freedom of mind,” oosing at whi orders to express
dynamic complexes, Deleuze evoking “oosing” as “the Promethean sin par
excellence.”
281 In this way, an individual whose destiny is involved with a

particular complex, like the Oedipal, can express this narrative relation in a
literal family drama, but also on the world-historic stage as a Promethean
philosopher like Deleuze rebelling against a patriaral precursor like Hegel,
who was himself once a revolutionary philosopher, or against the Oedipal
itself, dramatizing “the same story, but at different levels.”282 Deleuze ose
the highest expression of this particular complex, carrying it toward the
limit of “what a body can do,”283 though the destiny of ea life is
constituted in a multiplicity of complexes projectively elicited from the
groundless “heterogeneous dimension”284 of differential relations between
the mythological figures that pervade Deleuze’s thought: Apollonian ordered
centrality; the nurturing relationality of Apollo’s twin sister, Artemis; the
Hermetic or Mercurial transductive swiness of thought; the love, desire,
and araction of Aphrodite and Eros; the directed, penetrating wrath of
Ares; the regal expansiveness and inflation of Zeus; the contractive
judgment and negation of Kronos; the revolutionary liberation and
transgressive discontinuity of Prometheus; the Narcissistic Ego-God complex
and its imaginal dissolution; the transformative Dionysian death and rebirth;
and many others. ese mythologically figured problematic dynamisms
coexist at a transcendental horizon, demanding integral actualization within
the more constrained domains of the particular spatiotemporal constructions
aracteristic of our cosmic epo, though the full range of their potential
relations is not exhausted by the differentiations and integrations across
scale that have occurred in actuality.
And as a potent complex is enacted by an individual at different orders of
expression in internally resonant moments separated on a linear timeline, so
that Deleuze can perform an Oedipal relation to his father as a young man,
but become the embodiment (with Guaari) of the anti-Oedipal in middle
age, so can two or more different individuals enact a particular role in whi
“one life may replay another at a different level.”285 e role Deleuze plays as
a defining conceptual persona of a philosophical era thus constitutes a
differential repetition of the role enacted by Hegel, the same melody played
in a different style and with different lyrics by different incarnations of “the
already-Overman.”286 is repetition is not the habitual, bare repetition of
the same, whi is merely an effect, but the animating eternal return whi
causes novelty to emerge in the theater of linear history, with Luther
enacting a novel iteration of the role performed by Paul, and the Fren
Revolution reenacting the founding of the Roman Republic on a more
expansively liberated order of activity. e temporally later repetitions are
not merely analogous to an originary event, but rather all repetitions recede
infinitely through a series of masks toward a “dark” or “obscure
precursor.”287 ese philosophical, religious, or political revolutionaries are
affectively lured by the same virtual Ideas, oen with explicit knowledge
that they are reenacting the narrative of a past figure in novel historical
conditions as derivatives in a nonlocal series, producing the future through a
metamorphosis of those conditions by creating something radically new,
something that had not yet been actually existent, in “an eternally excentric
circle”288 enacting the progressive movement of an always-indiscernible
polycentric singularity and cosmic horizon woven together through a string
theory of narrative threads.289 And this is the infinite task we undertake as
philosophers: differentially to repeat, and to integrate through novel forms
of language, the repetitions enacted by philosophical precursors in an eternal
retelling of the world-constituting narrative leading ba in a complexly
interwoven and resonant system of transversal series not to an originary
philosopher, but to the obscure precursor, the infinite regress of virtual
dynamisms coexisting in a “divine game”290 whose rules we invent as we
play by means of the questions we ask, composed in the book of the
aosmos where we write the dreams of the gods.291
Notes
1. See solar.google.com.
2. Dosse, Intersecting, 306.
3. Žižek, Organs, xxi.
4. Deleuze, Difference, 227.
5. Deleuze solars cannot even agree whether it should be spelled
“Deleuzean” or “Deleuzian.”
6. Deleuze, Negotiations, 7.
7. Deleuze, Two, 63.
8. Deleuze, Negotiations, 7.
9. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 257.
10. Deleuze, Two, 300.
11. Deleuze, Two, 159.
12. May, Deleuze, 26.
13. Deleuze, Difference, xxi.
14. Deleuze, Essays, v.
15. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 141.
16. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 70; May, Deleuze, 15.
17. See Deleuze, “Sur Spinoza.”
18. Butler, Subjects, 176, 183–4.
19. Deleuze, Grounding? 166.
20. Culp, Dark, 2.
21. Somers-Hall, Hegel, Deleuze, 1, 4.
22. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 57–8.
23. Wahl, “Review.”
24. Cisney, Deleuze, 93–4.
25. Malabou, “Wolves?” 114.
26. Malabou, “Wolves?” 117.
27. Žižek, Organs, x.
28. Malabou, “Wolves?” 120.
29. Malabou, “Wolves?” 136.
30. Malabou, “Wolves?” 121.
31. Malabou, “Wolves?” 130.
32. Deleuze, Difference, 50.
33. Deleuze, Difference, 269.
34. Deleuze, Difference, xix.
35. Deleuze, Difference, 2.
36. Cole, Theory, 158–9.
37. Deleuze and Guaari, Thousand, 22–3. See Jameson, “Marxism,” 1.
38. Deleuze, Foucault, 32.
39. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 21.
40. Deleuze, Difference, xix.
41. Deleuze, Difference, 30–2.
42. Deleuze, Difference, xv.
43. Deleuze, Difference, 52, 268.
44. Hegel, Logic, 78.
45. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 50, 92–3.
46. Dosse, Intersecting, 214.
47. Deleuze, Desert, 192.
48. Deleuze, Kafka, 10.
49. Deleuze, Letters, 227–8.
50. Deleuze, Two, 308–9.
51. Deleuze, Kafka, 14.
52. Deleuze, Two, 124.
53. Deleuze and Guaari, Philosophy? 85–6.
54. Beman, Deleuze, 8. See also Hoinski, Humanlife.
55. Deleuze, Empiricism, 107.
56. Deleuze, Two, 193.
57. Deleuze, Grounding? 58.
58. Deleuze, Essays, 47.
59. Žižek, Organs, 48.
60. Dosse, Intersecting, 89.
61. Deleuze, Kafka, 12.
62. Deleuze, Two, 137.
63. Deleuze, L’Abécédaire, 32.
64. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 167.
65. Deleuze, L’Abécédaire, 59.
66. Deleuze, Essays, 52, 135.
67. Dosse, Intersecting, 88–9.
68. Deleuze, Difference, xviii.
69. Hippolyte, Logic, 195.
70. Dosse, Intersecting, 119–20; Dosse, Letters, 197.
71. Deleuze, Desert, 53.
72. Deleuze, Two, 132.
73. Winelmann, Art, 44.
74. Nietzse, Ecce, 107.
75. Nietzse, Human, 82, 247, 336; Nietzse, Anti-Christ, 42, 226, 272;
Nietzse, Ecce, 40.
76. Deleuze, Two, 78.
77. Goethe, Essential, xxiii.
78. Reyes, “Beautiful.”
79. Hegel, Phenomenology, 575–6.
80. Milne, “Beautiful,” 64, 71; Taylor, Hegel, 194.
81. Deleuze, Two, 91.
82. Deleuze, Difference, xx.
83. Deleuze, Difference, 207.
84. Deleuze, Difference, 52.
85. Deleuze, Negotiations, 136.
86. Deleuze, Difference, 53.
87. Deleuze, Desert, 118.
88. Prideaux, Dynamite! 206; Deleuze, Letters, 275.
89. Heidegger, Parmenides, 52–3.
90. Deleuze, Difference, 7.
91. Deleuze, Fold, 86–94.
92. Beman, Deleuze, 14; Kaufman, “Betraying,” 651.
93. Duvernoy, “Beautiful,” 172, 174, 179–80. See Ramey, Hermetic.
94. Duvernoy, “Beautiful,” 181.
 95. Deleuze, Difference, xv.
96. Deleuze, Empiricism, 105; Deleuze, Grounding? 4–5, 166.
97. Duvernoy, “Beautiful,” 171, 173, 181.
98. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 10.
99. Deleuze, Desert, 278.
100. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 111.
101. Deleuze, Dialogues, 15–16.
102. Deleuze, Essays, 52.
103. See Cusa, Learned.
104. See Magee, Hegel.
105. Deleuze, Bacon, 62, 118; See also Ramey, Hermetic.
106. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 248.
107. Deleuze, Desert, 277.
108. Deleuze, Difference, 7.
109. Harman, Object-Oriented, 6.
110. Duffy, Mathematics, 168.
111. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 58; Bergson, Matter, 181, 227.
112. Deleuze, Dialogues, 10.
113. Coen and Coen, Lebowski.
114. Deleuze, Negotiations, 6.
115. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 1.
116. Deleuze, Desert, 45–7; Deleuze, Proust, 67; Deleuze, Bergsonism, 93.
117. Bergson, Matter, 73.
118. Deleuze, Negotiations, 48; Deleuze, Cinema 2, 75.
119. Deleuze, Bacon, 47.
120. Deleuze, Essays, 131.
121. Deleuze, Two, 239.
122. Deleuze, Difference, xii.
123. Deleuze, Difference, 56.
124. Deleuze, L’Abécédaire, 104.
125. Deleuze, Kafka, 67.
126. Deleuze, Difference, 52.
127. Deleuze, Difference, 59.
128. Deleuze and Guaari, Thousand, 23.
129. Deleuze, Difference, 54.
130. Deleuze, Difference, 55.
131. Deleuze, Difference, 63.
132. Whitehead, Process, 39.
133. Deleuze, Difference, 262.
134. Bergson, Matter, 242.
135. Deleuze, Difference, 12.
136. Deleuze, Difference, 56; Deleuze, Negotiations, 65.
137. Deleuze, Difference, 7–8.
138. Deleuze, Two, 374.
139. Deleuze, Essays, 67.
140. Deleuze, Difference, 7.
141. Deleuze, Difference, 2.
142. Deleuze, Essays, 124.
143. Deleuze, Difference, 104.
144. Deleuze, Foucault, 132.
145. Kerslake, Unconscious, 141.
146. Deleuze, Difference, 7.
147. Deleuze, Difference, 104.
148. Deleuze, Difference, 271.
149. Deleuze, Masochism, 30.
150. Deleuze, Difference, 16.
151. Nietzse, Ecce, 73.
152. Deleuze, Difference, 19.
153. Deleuze, Difference, 6.
154. Deleuze, Difference, 21.
155. Deleuze, Difference, 23; Deleuze, Essays, 51.
156. Hope, Tour, 96.
157. Simondon, Individuation, 557–8; Saban, “Simondon”; Deleuze, Desert,
87–8.
158. Deleuze, Difference, 40.
159. Deleuze, Difference, 41.
160. Deleuze, Difference, 55.
161. Deleuze, Difference, 46.
162. Deleuze, Difference, 49.
163. Deleuze, Difference, 8.
164. Deleuze, Difference, 262.
165. Deleuze, Difference, 262.
166. Deleuze, Difference, 264.
167. Deleuze, Negotiations, 124.
168. Deleuze, Difference, 185; Deleuze, Letters, 241.
169. Deleuze, Difference, 56.
170. Deleuze, Difference, 131.
171. Deleuze, Difference, 131.
172. Deleuze, Difference, 154.
173. Deleuze, Difference, 132.
174. Deleuze, Two, 48.
175. Deleuze, Difference, 201.
176. Deleuze, Difference, 76.
177. Deleuze, Difference, 136.
178. Deleuze, Difference, 139.
179. Deleuze, Difference, 143.
180. Deleuze, Letters, 89.
181. Deleuze, Letters, 143.
182. Deleuze, Letters, 241.
183. Deleuze, Letters, 155.
184. Deleuze, Letters, 145.
185. Deleuze, Letters, 155.
186. Deleuze, Letters, 58.
187. Deleuze, Letters, 155.
188. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 153.
189. Deleuze, Difference, 58.
190. Deleuze, Nietzsche, 4; Jung, Archetypes, 13.
191. Deleuze, Difference, 290.
192. Deleuze, Essays, 45.
193. Deleuze, Difference, 86.
194. Deleuze, Desert, 180.
195. Deleuze, Difference, 6.
196. Deleuze, Difference, 15.
197. Deleuze, Difference, 56.
198. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 253.
199. Deleuze, Essays, 101, 105–6.
200. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 238.
201. Deleuze, Difference, 17.
202. Deleuze, Difference, 104.
203. Deleuze, Difference, 181.
204. Deleuze, Foucault, 104.
205. Deleuze, Desert, 31.
206. Deleuze, Kant, 5.
207. Deleuze, Foucault, 32.
208. Deleuze, Difference, 208–11.
209. Deleuze, Grounding? 13n8.
210. Kerslake, “Grounding,” 30.
211. Deleuze, Grounding? 14.
212. Plotinus, Enneads, 52–3.
213. Deleuze, Grounding? 15.
214. Deleuze, Grounding? 13.
215. Deleuze, Grounding? 43.
216. Deleuze, Grounding? 175. See Deleuze, Cinema 1, 189.
217. Deleuze, Difference, 60–1.
218. Plato, Works, 310, 312, 315.
219. Deleuze, Difference, 60–1.
220. Deleuze, Difference, 36.
221. Deleuze, Difference, 62.
222. Jung, Archetypes, 439.
223. Deleuze, Difference, 145.
224. Deleuze, Kant, x.
225. Deleuze, Difference, 24.
226. Deleuze, Difference, 128.
227. Deleuze, Difference, 146; Deleuze, Cinema 2, 104.
228. Srodinger, Life? 48–50.
229. Deleuze, Difference, 146.
230. Deleuze, Difference, 220.
231. Deleuze, Difference, 66.
232. Hippolyte, Logic, 193.
233. Deleuze, Difference, 127.
234. Deleuze, Difference, 219.
235. Jung, Archetypes, 32.
236. Deleuze, Difference, 245.
237. Deleuze, Difference, 64.
238. Plato, Phaedrus, 25–6; Deleuze, Grounding? 112.
239. Deleuze, Difference, 146.
240. Deleuze, Empiricism, 106.
241. Deleuze, Grounding? 88–9.
242. Deleuze, Foucault, 46.
243. Deleuze, Difference, 202.
244. Deleuze, Difference, 112.
245. Deleuze, Desert, 125.
246. Deleuze, Difference, 235.
247. Deleuze, Foucault, 13.
248. Deleuze, Difference, 181.
249. Deleuze, Difference, 250.
250. Deleuze, Desert, 88.
251. Deleuze, Difference, 190.
252. Deleuze, Difference, 252; Deleuze, Foucault, 75–77.
253. Deleuze, Empiricism, 86.
254. Deleuze, Difference, 174.
255. Deleuze, Difference, 209.
256. Deleuze, Difference, 217.
257. Deleuze, Difference, 250.
258. Deleuze, Foucault, 32; See also Deleuze, Bacon, 85.
259. Deleuze, Foucault, 246.
260. Deleuze, Desert, 95.
261. Deleuze, Two, 206.
262. Deleuze, Difference, 86.
263. Deleuze, Essays, 99, 120.
264. Deleuze, Difference, 246.
265. Deleuze, Two, 127.
266. Deleuze, “Postscript.”
267. Deleuze, “Postscript,” 191.
268. Deleuze, “Postscript,” 216.
269. Deleuze, “Postscript,” 218.
270. Deleuze, “Postscript,” 165.
271. Stengers, Thinking, 240.
272. Deleuze, Difference, 192.
273. Deleuze, Difference, 88.
274. Deleuze, Difference, 92.
275. Deleuze, Difference, 110.
276. Deleuze, Difference, 94.
277. Deleuze, Difference, 304.
278. Deleuze, Difference, 243.
279. Deleuze, Difference, 83.
280. Deleuze, Two, 283.
281. Deleuze, Essays, 79.
282. Deleuze, Difference, 83.
283. Deleuze, Expressionism, 148.
284. Deleuze, Difference, 229.
285. Deleuze, Difference, 83.
286. Deleuze, Difference, 90.
287. Deleuze, Difference, 119; Deleuze, Desert, 97.
288. Deleuze, Difference, 91.
289. See Desmond, Psyche.
290. Deleuze, Difference, 116.
291. Deleuze, Difference, 189.
Chapter 12
Disintegrated Integration
James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-13

Hillman founded the sool of aretypal psyology whi, though heavily

indebted to Jung, carries the aretypal mode of thought into novel domains
complexly informed by philosophy. In fact, Hillman’s 1975 book bears
remarkable similarities to Deleuze’s work culminating in Difference and
Repetition and The Logic of Sense, and to his work with Guaari in the two
volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, though there does not appear to
be any textual evidence that the American psyologist read the Fren
theorists or vice versa, so it seems that these thinkers were independently
developing their strikingly similar concepts based on numerous common
influences and interests. While anowledging his particular debt to Jung,
Hillman esews being designated as merely Jungian, a role whi even
Jung recognized “is possible only for Jung,” despite the common tendency
toward erecting an orthodoxy in relation to any great thinker, as “ea
psyology is a confession”1 of the particular psyic constitution of the
psyologist who creates it, an instrument enabling certain kinds of insight
and not others. Hillman forges especially beyond Jung’s intermient
emphasis of monotheism, the Trinity, and its accompanying mode of
consciousness, the individuation of the Self oen eoing the reconciling
third of the Hegelian dialectic, fracturing and deepening the psye into the
pluralistic multiplicity of polytheism,2 whi Hillman finds resonant with
the work of James. Jung certainly recognizes the importance of pluralism,
though he focuses more than Hillman on Christianity, having formulated his
initial conceptions of the aretypes and the collective unconscious from
within a generally Protestant and Kantian milieu.
Re-Visioning Psychology is organized around four primary activities: the
imaginal discernment of potencies genealogically descended from Selling’s
metaphysical empiricism, whi Hillman terms personifying; the process of
pathologizing, a differentiating tarrying with depressive or sizophrenic
affects and problems closely related to Deleuze’s expression of a mythical
dialectic constituted in the pathology of repetition, and to sizoanalysis; the
process of seeing through the infinite regress of imaginal figures to discern
the gods behind the pathologies, whi he terms psyologizing; and the
activity of dehumanizing, whi leads to a decentering of the individual
akin to Deleuze’s dissolved self in sustained engagement with empirically
encountered polytheistic potencies luring us toward an always-receding
horizon. All of these activities are engaged in “soul-making,”3 whi, as with
Jung and Deleuze, conceives human experience in the vale of the world as
primarily engaged in constructing a pluralistic psyic Self beyond the
merely psyological, a soulful constructivism lured by the affective
teleological inclinations of destiny, figured by the anima, through the
synronistic repetition of aretypal dramas involving divine fictional
potencies aracteristic of the eternal return. Hillman engages deeply with
ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy, history, and religion to
generate a heterodox mode of thought, whi transgresses and disrupts the
boundaries between disciplines, beyond the crisis of the late-modern doxa in
whi we are still evidently embroiled, as concepts also grow old and rigid,
periodically requiring novel eruptions of active, juvenescent vitality.
Hillman deeply appreciated Whitehead’s thought, recognizing the
becomings expressed in the concept of process as essential to aretypal
psyology, elsewhere drawing deeply on Whiteheadian metaphysical
abstraction to sket a “psyological cosmology” whi engages with
cosmological speculation,4 though he pushes against Whitehead’s
conception of dynamisms as the solely impersonal, mathematical
potentialities of eternal objects, whi he nevertheless describes as one valid
mode of expression.
Hillman recognizes the risk of explicitly engaging with the word “soul” in
a modern culture permeated by Weberian “disenantment,” itself a kind of
negative enantment, the “capitalist sorcery” of Stengers and Pignarre,
though Hillman emphasizes from the outset that he is not concerned with
soul as a substance, but rather with the psye as a perspectival concept
inhabiting a “middle ground”5 that differentiates between the human subject
and the events in whi this subject is situated. is paradoxical Self is
composed of the relations of potent multiplicities, mirrored in the other, like
the moon reflecting the sun’s light, so that the truth of any event is located
neither in the ego nor in the other, but in the mirroring relation, Hillman
evoking truths as “the fictions of the rational” just as “fictions are the truths
of the imaginal,”6 resonant with Deleuze’s assertion that “the real and the
imaginary” do not seem to “form a pertinent distinction.”7 Overturning the
usual modern privileging of the physical, Hillman suggests that the faculties
and experiences proper to the psye – imagination, narrative, speculation,
dream, fantasy – are in fact the primary realities of human existence. Like
Deleuze and Guaari, who write that “all signs are signs of signs,”8 Hillman
recognizes world and mind as primarily constituted in an infinite regress of
complex interrelations of symbol and metaphor (despite Deleuze and
Guaari’s provocative denial of the mainic as metaphorical9), in whi the
world we encounter through sensation and perception is always permeated
and informed by the imaginal and the signifying. All experience, even the
tough-minded logical engagement with the hard facts of materiality
aracteristic of science or a rationalist negative philosophy, is ultimately
grounded in relational fantasy, for whi the mythical gods serve as a
primary cast of aracters in their “exquisite differentiations.”10 Critical
consciousness is a mode of dramatic narrative construction associated with
Kronos, and detaed clarity and distinctness is associated with Apollo,
relational masks carrying implicit affective, conceptual, and ethical premises,
forming the preconditions for the particular modes of engagement that have
generally been privileged and constructed as the primary reality in the
central nodes of modern discourse. Like Deleuze’s deemphasis of the
negative and the ordered Apollonian in favor of aosmic multiplicity,
Hillman recognizes the Senex, associated with Kronos, and the Apollonian
as together personifying one potent complex among many,11 as “even that
precious instrument, reason, loses its freedom of insight when it forgets the
divine persons who govern its perspectives,”12 becoming rigid and static in a
constraining monotheism of consciousness blind to the dynamisms it
embodies. In fact, Deleuze, following Nietzse, perhaps even conflates
Apollo with qualities more specifically aracteristic of Kronos, writing that
“Apollo is both the god of judgment and the god of dreams,”13 though it is
true that, like all gods, Kronos must always be imagined in relation, despite
his penant for despotic solitude, the complex of totalitarian centrality and
legislative rationality enacting the deficient alliance of Kronos and Apollo,
always seeking to control and discipline the Promethean urge toward
liberation from constraint, the Dionysian creative aos.
Hillman traces the origins of depth psyology to Heraclitus in the
imaginal construction of a fragment that discerns the inexhaustible meaning
(logos) of the mind or soul (psyche) in a groundless depth (bathun), rather
than the psyic tabula rasa oen imagined in modernity.14 While the
dimension of spirit has long been figured as height, the movement of soul-
making is a descent into the underworld, the katabasis of Greek mythology
prefiguring the going down into the unconscious particularly expressed in
the pages above by Nietzse and Jung. It is a descent into the various
psyological symptoms from whi we all suffer, the pathological problems
posed by complexes of aretypal potencies in an infinite regress luring us
toward an intensive horizon, “the border where the true depths are,”15 by
asymptotically expressing the relational “set of dynamisms”16 that composes
us. We are coerced by our most private and peculiar sufferings to bring these
polycentric potentialities into actuality, Hillman referring to the dialectic of
the Phaedrus for whi the gods serve as both audience and subject.
Complexes are “sacrifices to these powers,”17 Hillman evoking Aristotle’s
recognition that pathos does not necessarily imply suffering, but more
generally enacts the experiential, qualitative “movements of the soul”18 that
are undergone in all their multivalence, though Hillman pushes against the
Aristotelian “organic fallacy,”19 whi constructs the individual body as
correlated with an individual soul, the root of the individualist fantasy of
Western psyology. Hillman discerns three soul-making movements
beyond egoic individualism in Plato: eros (connected to the myth of Psye
and Eros, with whi Aphrodite is involved); dialectics (perhaps correlated
with the intellect of Hermes and the division of Kronos); and mania
(associated with Dionysus). He also suggests a fourth movement, anatos,
the minor Greek god of death associated with the Freudian death drive (also
variously associated, in different valences, with both Kronos and Dionysus),
a suggestion whi finds precedent in Plato’s depiction of Socrates’ death
leading to a profound self-knowledge in the Phaedo, a pathologizing in
relation to death intimately intertwined with Freud’s founding of depth
psyology in its modern form.
ere is a section in Plotinus’ Enneads, “e Problems of the Soul,” in
whi “the souls of men” witness their reflection “in the mirror of
Dionysus,”20 the descent into the labyrinthine unconscious lured ever deeper
by Ariadne’s anima thread, a descent whi fractures the unified self into a
multiplicity of shards, “disintegrating the ‘I,’ ”21 as Hillman writes, rendering
visible the infinitely receding dynamisms that compose individuality
resonant with Deleuze’s “fractured I.” e envisaging of aretypal
multiplicity is not an activity undertaken by intellect alone, but a
personifying of the various affective complexes that compose us, an anti-
nominalist naming of powers acting through our bodily motivity, whi
allows us consciously to engage with these potencies in the form of
Mielangelo’s “image of the heart,”22 Deleuze’s “amorous organ of
repetition,” as encountered animating others rather than as mere animal
feelings with no relevance to the logical facts exclusively privileged by the
rationality of the head, the capital “organ of exange.” is imaginal
epistemology is a mode of radically empirical perception more profound
than mere sense perception or pure reason, a mode whi knows not in a
detaed, objective, and violent categorizing, but through “the aempt to
integrate heart into method” by loving what it seeks to know, because “love
personalizes all that it loves,” as Hillman quotes Miguel de Unamuno, and
“only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.”23 Rational
knowing can only know the exterior of concepts and phenomena, while the
interior knowing of Eros loves personified Ideas as dynamic, subjective,
agential others to whom the individual relates, with whi the Self is
intimately entwined, an affective and imaginal empiricism resonant with all
of the metaphysical, radical, intuitive, speculative, and transcendental
empiricisms above, though this erotic epistemology is “one style of madness,
no more privileged than any other.”24
e infinite aretypal potencies through whi we eternally return, the
archai as prefigured by Plotinus, whi Hillman designates as fictional, like
infinitesimals, are primarily accessible to imaginal construction. ey can
only be circled in upon through the iterative repetitions of figurative
language, as “all ways of speaking of aretypes are translations from one
metaphor to another,”25 aempts to evoke dynamisms whi always exceed
their actual expressions as Ideas, myths, genres, modes, concepts,
syndromes, potentialities, pathologies, types, or fantasies, a pluralist mode of
thought whi precludes the reductive dogmatism of monovalent typologies
with whi the aretypes are oen confused.26 A primary aracteristic of
the aretypes is that they are always accompanied by affects that possess
us, that form consciousness itself in their infinite groundless relationality.
e task of human existence is to oose at whi level to express the
dramatic interweavings of the gods that constitute us, whether in the lowest
register of the blind fate of a literalist Oedipal rebellion, or in the highest
register as the philosopher who actively wrestles with his felt destiny
concretely to embody the anti-Oedipal in its most profound formulation,
two expressions of a polar and paradoxical potentiality rather than a mere
opposition whi reduces to identity. Resonant with both the Derridean and
Deleuzean conceptions of difference, Hillman suggests that we must think
beyond Lévi-Strauss’ insistence on oppositional dualism as “the single
explanatory principle of mythical thought” to recognize that “dualities are
either faces of the same, or assume a unity as their precondition or ultimate
goal (identity of opposites).”27
Aretypes, dynamisms for whi ea of the various nominations allow
the expression of different valences, constellate qualities and events
encountered by individuals into relatively discrete collective aggregates
describable under the designations of mythical figures. e aretype of the
hero, mu derided by casual critics of Jung (who oen only know him
through Joseph Campbell’s popularizations), an aretype whose dominance
it is one of Hillman’s primary projects to problematize, is associated with a
composition of intertwined activities (initiatory activation, “conative
striving,” exploring and extending frontiers, facing obstacles or foes), visible
in various concentrations of emphasis in particular figures (Heracles,
Ailles, Odysseus), who embody the aracteristics of the heroic mode of
consciousness (independent, strong, ambitious, decisive, virtuous,
conquering, dominant, embaled, single-minded). But the heroic aretype
exceeds these lists, as the figures that exemplify it display an individuality
that can only be approaed by differentiation into their various qualities,
but whi must be integrated in their narrative enactments in relation to
other dynamisms if they are to be appreciated and encountered in their
infinite potentiality.
It is this aretype of the unified egoic individual, heroically “baling his
way through binary oices,”28 that has long been the dominant one in
Western culture, in concert with the monocentric rationality of legislation
and control traceable to despotic Kronos and his grandson Apollo. As with
Deleuze, this alliance of the ego mirroring a jealous and merciful God in an
exclusivist monotheism of consciousness is the delusional mode of relation
Hillman seeks to fracture, dissolve, overturn, and re-vision in his expression
of a polytheistic psyology, a descent into generative aos. is
psyology of the depths is not merely a return to ancient doctrinal religion,
or an escape from the modern West into (Westernized) Eastern thought,
nonmodern animism, or teno-utopian futurism, though Hillman variously
recognizes the importance of engaging with these spatial and temporal
elsewheres, while insisting that the particularly modern and Western
tradition must face up to its presence. Rather, this psyology performs a
constant relation with an ensemble cast in whi all the gods and mythical
figures, as imagined in the mythos especially descended from the Greeks –
oen resonant with other mythologies – enact their parts in the interplay of
consciousness and event, though they may play a starring role in one
particular individual, or during one limited duration, but be relegated to a
role in the “differentiated baground”29 for other contexts. is
personifying mode of thought is not primarily interested in explanations
answering to the question “Why?” or causal meanisms that respond to the
question “How?”, though causes and explanations certainly have roles to
play, but in the quiddity of events answering to the question “What?”, a
question whi ultimately leads to the most profound question, the
importance of whi Deleuze also recognizes: “Who?” Who are the
aretypal persons acting through this event, complex, or symptom?30 Like
Deleuze’s “fractured I” and the heterogenous assemblages of
Deleuzoguaarian sizoanalysis, Hillman finds the overcoming of the
totalitarian dominance of a monotheistic ego in the recognition that we all
contain a multiplicity of persons within us, that we are constituted from this
personified multiplicity. Although this dissolving of the unified self may
appear to the still-dominant mode of consciousness as sizophrenic
madness, as “primitive” delusion, hallucination, pathetic fallacy,
anthropomorphism, or, at best, as ildishly credulous imagination, the only
way beyond the peculiarly modern mode of relation, intimately bound up
with the ecological, economic, political, social, epidemiological, and
psyological crises in whi we are embroiled, is to bring the differentiated
aention of intellect and heroic intentionality to bear in this descent into the
underworld domain of repressed potencies. us, the literalist totalitarian
ego can die and be transformed in a more democratic and pluralist imaginal
renascence.31
Resonant with the decentered eternal return expressed by Deleuze,
Hillman describes his approa as enacting “repetitions with variations,”32
circulating through Ideas in sustained engagement with “crucial insoluble
problems” and “the deepest questions,”33 esewing linearity in favor of
“ever-recurring motifs in ever-new variations,”34 spiraling in upon
integrating evocations of eternally recurring aretypal potencies and their
multiple modes of complex ingression. He performs “an infinite regress
whi does not stop at coherent or elegant answers,” moving toward an
always-receding deus absconditus “who appears only in
35
concealment,” affirming multiplicity, paradox, and ambiguity in the masks
and disguises of the depths. Hillmanian integration is not the “integration of
personality”36 aracteristic of most modern psyotherapy, still dominated
by the Christian and Cartesian demand for unification from opposition, in
whi the errant persons of the psye are returned to their putatively
proper place, subordinated to the egoic center, but a deeper kind of
integration for whi “conflicts become paradoxes.”37 is integration does
not suppress difference, but is constituted in complex narrative
differentiation. e Greek word therapeutes, from whi “therapist” is
derived, means “one who serves the gods,” and mu like the problematic
differenciation of the Deleuzean dissolved self, Hillman conceives of
psyologizing as solving a problematic situation “not by resolving it, but by
dissolving the problem into the fantasy that is congealed into a ‘problem.’ ”38
e etymology of fantasy indicates a rendering visible of the dynamisms
occluded by the impeding obstacle of the specific kind of oppositional
problem required by the heroic ego, encountering the phantasmic
multiplicity exceeding egoic consciousness, allowing the formulation of
more profound questions than those constrained by shallower problematic
formulations, the literalist heroic fantasy that realistically esews fantasy
itself in order to defeat adversaries and conquer adversities opening to
deeper problems and the querying fantasies they elicit. Hillman explicitly
anowledges that he is engaging in discordant polemic, a contentious and
provocative mode similar in some ways to Deleuze and Guaari, evoking
Heraclitus’ assertion that “strife is the father of all things,”39 though Hillman
also exemplifies Gebser’s speculative suggestion about a lost fragment whi
affirms peace as “the mother of all things,”40 enacting a polyvocal balance of
differentiating discord and integrating harmony beyond gender binarity, a
discordant harmony resonant with the “peace fighters”41 evoked by Stengers.
As with Selling’s positing of the ontologically ambiguous reality of
mythical potencies complexly taken up by Nietzse, Jung, and Deleuze,
Hillman invites us to transgress the modern enclosure of psye under the
totalitarian control, and capitalist ownership (“capital” deriving from the
Latin for “head’), of unified egoic rationality. He exhorts us to return, with
the critical discernment differentiated through the negative philosophy, not
only to nonmodern modes whi apprehend disparate persons within the
individual human psye, but to modes of relation whi encounter persons
in nonhuman animals, in nature and cosmos, and perhaps especially in the
dramatic narrative constructions of events conceived as the relations of
dynamisms who have lile use for rigid distinctions between internal and
external, psye and cosmos. In a mode of thought especially resonant with
Stengers, Hillman offers a liberating reengagement with animism, not as a
mere return to nonmodern modes, but in a differentiated integration of
modern rationality and the intimate engagement with anima, forming the
root of animate and animal, and serving as the Jungian term for others who
teleologically lure us toward becoming through a personifying projection
beyond mere pathetic fallacy. Rather, this reclaiming of animism is a
dissolving of the constitutive modern boundary between subject and object
to envisage the aretypal potencies in relation to whom we must
individuate, who constitute the heterogenous relational ground of our
individuality.
Like most of the theorists discussed in these apters, Hillman recognizes
that the engagement with witcra, sorcery, drugs, madness, the hermetic,
and the occult are all strategies for overcoming the modern repression of the
imaginal as a mode only appropriate for art or ildren’s games.
Nominalism reduces the words whi name aretypes, as well as the word
“aretype” itself, to the pedagogy of category, conceit, and allegory, whi
“keeps the autonomy and reality of the Gods at bay,”42 explanations whose
sole efficacy was rejected by Selling in order to excavate a positive theory
of potencies. ese rationalist constructions cling to the naïve, totalizing
belief that there must be some reasonable explanation for the encounter
with reason’s others, anything but the recognition of real – though
ontologically elusive – entities to whom nonmodern people constantly
relate, who lurk even within the shadowy interstices of modernity, in the
bawaters, countercultures, and asylums. Hillman discerns those sorcerous,
animistic, and sizophrenizing activities as openings to a pervasive
transformation in our ways of conceiving the world. is transformation
enacts an overcoming of the Weberian disenanted “spirit of capitalism,”
the exclusivist dominance of the Senex aretype of rational judgment and
central control, to discover a world pervaded by polycentric, rhizomatic
networks of personal potencies, animate psyes, ensouled aretypes whi
render the apparently intractable problem of the radical separation of
subject and object obsolete, a necessary stage in a process of differentiation
that must be subsumed in a more expansive and intensive mode of relation.
e depotentiating incarceration of nonrational, imaginal modes by the
rationality of law, medicine, theology, and psyiatry as perversion, siness,
sin, and insanity, when expressed beyond their trivializing enclosures, is
inextricably intertwined with the exclusive privileging of those modes
necessary, however temporarily, for the differentiation of rational intellect.
Hillman also reciprocally pushes against the approa of R.D. Laing, whom
he describes as enacting a reversal in whi it is only society that is insane,
and the individual who is sane in their madness, offering sizophrenizing
as a therapeutic mode, so that Deleuze and Guaari can write that “Laing is
entirely right in defining the sizophrenic process as a voyage of initiation,
a transcendental experience of the loss of the Ego.”43 However, whereas
Laing almost exclusively discerns the location of madness in the society in
whi the individual is imprisoned, Deleuze and Guaari’s views are more
balanced in this regard, consonant with Hillman. While they recognize that
Laing is one of only a small number of theorists who have “escaped the
familialism that is the ordinary bed and board of psyoanalysis and
psyiatry,”44 he does not go far enough, ultimately falling “ba into the
worst familialist, personological, and egoic postulates.”45 ey affirm that the
egoic individual is not merely the pure and martyred victim of a si society
as Laing contends, but the primary locus of disintegrating pathologies that
exceed this binary, demanding expression as faculties carried to the limit of
“what the body can do,” reintegrated as differentiated contrasts in the
Dionysian depths beyond egoic totality. ey contend that “very few
accomplish what Laing calls the breakthrough of this sizophrenic wall or
limit,” and that “the majority draw near the wall and ba away horrified,”46
so that this breaking through requires an extraordinary courage beyond
what Laing prescribes, a rupture demanded by the destiny of the
pathological potencies constituting “privileged souls,” to be enacted in a way
that is creative and generative, exemplified by Artaud, rather than as merely
insane. is insight is resonant with Hillman’s evocation of Andre Gide’s
recognition “that illness opens doors to a reality whi remains closed to the
healthy point of view,” and that “the soul sees by means of affliction,”47 a
Nietzsean “Great Health.”48
Deleuze reportedly remarked to Guaari about his work at La Borde
psyiatric clinic, “How can you stand those sizos?”49 declaring elsewhere
that “I am less and less able to tolerate romanticizing madness,”50 illustrating
that Deleuze and Guaari were not simply valorizing sizophrenia,51 as
Hillman portrays Laing’s theory, but rather advocating an intentional
appropriation of sizophrenic affects and imaginings to discover heterodox
modes of relation in order to overcome the Oedipal imprisonment
aracteristic of monocentric psyology and capitalism.52In a passage that
could be mistaken for a summary of the critique of psyoanalysis in Anti-
Oedipus, Hillman writes: “e one major concession to the mythical
imagination – Freud’s Oedipus fantasy – remained within the realm of
monotheism. One myth alone could account for the psye of all
humankind.”53 Although Deleuze and Guaari are more positive than
Hillman about Laing’s “antipsyiatry,” whi they judge as going “very far
in this direction” of overcoming the Oedipal, they nevertheless contend that
Laing and his sool “localize social and mental alienation on a single line,”54
producing a dualism along this unidimensional axis whi Deleuze and
Guaari played a primary role in overcoming.
 Hillman observes that Laing’s theory is partially descended from Hegel,
whom Hillman appreciates in a tempered valence, writing that Hegel
“considered insanity as a necessarily occurring form or stage in the
development of the soul,” a consideration whi reveals a surprising
resonance, yet again, between Hegel and Deleuze. However, as with the
Fren theorists’ critique of both Hegel and Laing, Hillman discerns Laing’s
“divided self,” partially derived from Gregory Bateson’s sizophrenic
“double bind”55 (the anthropologist from whom Deleuze and Guaari
derived “the word ‘plateau’ ”56), as an aempt “to restore itself to the perfect
inner harmony out of existing contradiction,”57 as Hillman quotes a lecture
by Hegel, a dialectical return to monocentric identity via negation producing
a “whitewashing” of the undeniable “ugliness, misery, and madness of
psyopathology.” Hillman identifies this whitewashing as “a classical denial
meanism”58 on the part of Laing, displacing the agency of the supposedly
pure and naturally virtuous individual exclusively onto a si and debased
society rather than recognizing the intimate reciprocity of individual and
society. It is this transitional reversal of the binary of sane normality and
insane abnormality whi it is a primary project of both Deleuze (with and
without Guaari) and Hillman to overcome in the opening to a polycentric
pluralism enacted through the Deleuzean method of dramatization, the
intentional sizophrenizing of Deleuzoguaarian sizoanalysis, and
Hillmanian personifying and pathologizing, the rhizomatic “differential
root” through whi “depth psyology maintains its integrity,”59 though
Hillman suggests that Hegel actually goes further than Laing in this regard.
Like Selling, Hillman advocates a return to thinking with the reality of
the gods without aempting to fix their ontological status, enacting an
overturning of the priority of reason over imagination. Rather than the gods
being contained by reason as mere allegory or superstition, reason itself
becomes one expression of an imaginally encountered god, Kronos or
Apollo, one ingression of the potencies whi exceed us and constitute us.
However, Hillman anowledges that this reengagement with the full reality
of the gods is not only a pleasant or enlightening endeavor, as their
repression by rationality is in part an aempt to master their negative
expressions, the demonic, monstrous, violent, cruel, and perverse. But it is
evident from the state of our late modern culture, from the demonic cruelty
of some of our leaders and the monstrous violence of our societies of
control, that these powers cannot ultimately be repressed without a
compensatorily brutal return, and in fact, their more destructive
manifestations may be mitigated if the aretypes are carried into conscious
awareness and engaged with in more salutary and efficacious ways, with
respect for their power and autonomy. e gods cannot be tamed, and the
centuries-long aempt to do so has produced the return of repressed
potencies on titanic scales in world war, genocide, ecological catastrophe,
and global pandemic, though what is demanded is not a mere regression to
nonmodern modes, whi are certainly not without their own violence and
cruelty, but an integration of capacities differentiated through successive
epos.
It is not only in medicalized psyiatry or Freudian psyoanalysis that
Hillman discerns this repression of potencies, as even in humanistic,
existential, or Gestalt psyology, or in various spiritual practices, however
holistic or nurturing, the gods demanding expression through dreams,
fantasies, affects, and pathologies are generally relegated to mere allegories
provided by our unconscious to facilitate our egocentric and salvational self-
actualization. is allegorization constructs a defensive imprisonment of the
gods within the safe enclosures of our individual psyes, whi can take the
form of Abraham Maslow’s peak experiences, the climbing of the rungs of
Westernized forms of transcendental meditation toward the divine One, or
even the ecstatic highs encountered in psyedelic experiences, whi all
oen result in ego inflation rather than in the pathological dissolution,
fracturing, and dismemberment of descent into the psyic depths necessary
for a transformative renascence whi decenters the ego in polycentric
multiplicity. “Without psyopathology there is no wholeness” and, “in fact,
psyopathology is a differentiation of that wholeness,”60 a differentiating
integration constructing ever-more-subtle and profound contrasts that
cannot be sublated away. ese activities can all be efficacious for certain
purposes, but the gods will never be appeased by being made pets whi we
stroke for egoic gratification in the depotentiating therapeutic ritual,
meditation retreat, or psyonautic trip. ey will continue to ignore these
pitiful enclosures, controlling and agonizing us until we recognize their
reality and autonomy, enacted in a reciprocal, decentered circulation for
whi the gods create us as mu as we create them. And it is precisely the
most perverse and disturbing fantasies and dreams that allow for the
transgression of the enclosure whi seeks to contain the imaginal gods
within the personal ego as mere personality traits rather than as numinous
agential powers with whom we must constantly contend to negotiate the
contours of our lived reality.
is impossible taming of the gods is intertwined with the equally
impossible taming of language, the restriction of the Logos to mere
nominalist logic, as words are the demons and angelic emissaries bearing
signs affirmed by Deleuze (with whom we sometimes wrestle, like Jacob),
oen gendered personal potencies infinitely receding into the etymological
depths, as especially illuminated by Selling. Verbal composition is an
enactment on the page of the dramatic relations of powers toward whi
words lure us, with some words particularly resonant with certain
aretypes, ea phrase, sentence, and paragraph more or less effectively
invoking and actualizing aretypal complexes. Hillman discerns this verbal
and rhetorical multivalence beyond the monovalence of nominalist
rationalism especially in Jung’s writing, the psye and logos of depth
psyology particularly concerned with this intertwining of soul and word.
Nominalism, the mode of thought aracteristic of the rationalist, analytic
tradition still dominant in anglophone philosophy, and of “the language
game called psyopathology,”61 the mania for a putatively empirical
naming and categorizing of psyiatric disorders occluding more profound
causes, can serve as an ego defense when imposed beyond its limited
domain of efficacy. e clarity, distinctness, and monocausality of
Apollonian rationality can repress the transformative aos, obscurity, and
multiplicity of the Dionysian depths judged as mere insanity, moed as
infantile, or anthropologically contained through its nomination as
“primitive” animism. When liberated, these imprisoned complexes emerge as
pathologies, though their repression in the unconscious produces even more
destructive expressions of these potencies, as witnessed in the very dark
shadow of a supposedly enlightened modernity: misogyny, racism,
homophobia, economic inequality, climate ange, genocide. e aretypes
must be faced one way or another, whether as avenging gods encountered as
externally mandated fate, or as unruly partners in a creation whi dissolves
the nominally generated boundaries between internal and external, self and
other, maintaining their differentiation in integration.
A primary mode of personifying potencies is myth, for whi the either-
or question of whether or not the gods are real – reality generally defined in
this context as purely material and rationally intelligible – coerces their
more profound and ambiguous reality, as elucidated by Selling, into a
oice between tough-minded skepticism and tender-minded credulity
whi is no oice at all. is oppositional selection obscures the deeper
controversy between exclusive duality and a broader multiplicity that
includes duality, a decision whi has already been made before the
question is even asked, forcing the oppositional binarity of exclusivist
rationality. is binary construction can be discerned as a shadow of a
deeper mode of relation whi integrates the differentiated material and
imaginal aspects of process nominally rendered as subject and object,
human and divine. e imaginal mode, the ungrounding ground of human
consciousness, emerges with a pluralist system of gods and mythical
persons, whi we create as lile as we create the persons in dreams. A
return to the recognition of the imaginal demanded for the full vitality of
human culture, not only in art and ildren’s games, but in all aspects of
experience, is intimately entwined in a reengagement with these mythical
potencies by differentiating rationality.
Hillman evokes the recognition by Selling that the nominalist project of
depersonifying and demythologizing creates the need for words to describe
the reality taken for granted prior to this negating movement, so that the
reductive conception of allegorical personification depends upon the
negation of the originary positing of human consciousness with mythical
persons. In a movement that evinces a distinctly dialectical flavor, the
assertion of personifying and the return to myth are only required by the
negation of what was always already present, though this tarrying with
critical negation has produced the precondition for bringing differentiating
rationality to bear in discerning mythical persons to produce a novel
dialectic that exceeds both a naïve imaginal credulity and a narrow
rationalist skepticism. Hillman suggests that this return to the gods, though
complexly expressed in philosophy, philology, anthropology, literary studies,
and other disciplines, has found its primary locus of ingression in the
psyologies of Freud and Jung, ultimately derived from Platonism and its
intertwining of eidos and episteme, its epistemology of Ideas. e gods have
forced their way through the centuries-long stranglehold of exclusivist
rationality in the form of psyopathologies – “multiple personalities,
hysterical dissociations, hallucinations”62 – encountered primarily by
practicing therapists and psyiatrists, both on the psyoanalytic cou and
in the psyiatric hospital.
As Deleuze recognized, these pathological persons were encountered by
Freud in the figures of Oedipus, Eros, and anatos, and in the Superego, the
Primal Horde, and the polymorphous perverse Child. Hillman similarly
emphasizes Freud’s realization that traumatic ildhood memories do not
necessarily lead ba to real events, but that even if they are connected to
real traumas, they lead to the instinctual forces of libido and wish-
fulfillment projected into the imaginal figures of Mother and Father, a
realization that Freud could not prevent from sliding into mythical
expressions, whi he explicitly designated “our mythology,” though
generally more monotheistic than polytheistic. Despite his tendency toward
reductive scientific materialism, Freud articulated what Hillman calls “a
cosmological fiction,”63 whi Freud primarily conceived in the mode of
instructive allegory, but whi ultimately enabled Jung to nominate these
pathological persons as aretypes. e psyoanalytic terms projection,
sublimation, and condensation are derived from alemy, and the mode of
thought developed through this lineage leads to the understanding that, as
with the refusal to aempt statically to pin down the ontological status of
the gods or the substances in the alembic, what is required is not a oice
between the reality of the traumatic event and the dismissive suspicion that
this event is a mere fantasy, but the recognition that the real and the
imaginal are always complexly intertwined. So, while the question in a
criminal prosecution of an abuser in a court of law is rightly whether or not
the abuse actually occurred as a concrete event, the more subtle and
profound question in the therapeutic consultation is what pragmatic effect
the remembered trauma has in the traumatized person’s experience,
repeated imaginally, and oen in differential dramatic reenactments with
other persons. Husband or wife, boss or teaer, lover or therapist serve as
substitutes for the person imagined in the originary event, whether or not
this event actually took place in precisely the way it is remembered,
ultimately serving as masks of transcendental potencies whi respond to
the question “Who?”
e same is true of all the various explanations discussed by Selling: the
ontological status of these imaginal figures, encountered in both mythology
and pathology, as demons to be exorcized or as complexes to be abreacted
by a “psyiatric priesthood,”64 is not the most important question,
answering the demand for the reduction to a single cause aracteristic of
science and rationality, a question possessing powerful but limited efficacy
whi Freud indicated the way beyond despite his adherence to rationalism.
It is Lou Salome, who played su an important role in Nietzse’s
biography, that introduced Freud to the work of Nietzse in 1912, an
influence evident in mu of Freud’s subsequent work, leading him as
Diotoma did with Plato to understand “that love requires personifying.”65
Once it has been accepted that the persons of the imagination are
ontologically multiple, aretypes finding expression across scales and
orders of human and nonhuman, internal and external experience, the
question becomes what can be done in relation to these potencies, what kind
of personal relationship one can cultivate with them, what kind of
Bergsonian swimmer one can become: Oedipus who unconsciously plays
out his tragic narrative as fate, or the theorist who sustainedly and
intentionally engages with the Oedipal in its highest problematic valence to
generate novel questions as preconditions for openings to more expansive
domains.
Whereas Freud implicitly justified his engagements with mythical
personification as elaborate and pervasive conceit, Jung recognized that the
psye is radically entwined with mythical and animistic modes. While the
unconscious found its early abstract formulations in the philosophies of
Leibniz and Kant, the complex lineage of Selling, Nietzse, and Freud
provided the conceptual bridge Jung required to rediscover the aretypal
persons of the psye, excavated from araic, Hellenic, medieval, and
Renaissance sources, and experientially encountered as agential,
autonomous potencies in his work with sizophrenic patients at the
Burghölzli psyiatric hospital. Even many of those who are leery of Jung
now take for granted the personifying modes of thought he bravely
pioneered in his sustained engagement with “sizoid multiplicity,”66
previously denigrated as merely primitive or insane. Deleuze and Guaari’s
assertion in the second sentence of A Thousand Plateaus that “since ea of
us was several, there was already quite a crowd”67 is at least partially
descended from Jung, who provided a primary opening from the exclusively
oppositional Freudian “psyodynamics,”68 the “hydraulic maine of
psyoanalysis”69 based on the physical model of equal and opposite
compensatory reactions, to a more pluralistic and topologically expansive
“psyodramatics,”70 resonant with the Deleuzean method of dramatization,
rendering Jung perhaps the most under-anowledged influence on
continental thought.
Nevertheless, it seems that many academic theorists who are drawn to
Jung’s work omit reference to him because of a legitimate fear of judgment
by their peers against the modes of thought he exemplifies, potentially
rendering their prospects for publication and employment even more
precarious than they already are within a capitalist mainic assemblage
whi extracts our labor while keeping us in a state of constant professional
and financial anxiety, though this bias against Jung appears currently to be
dissolving. As Mark Fisher writes, Capital is “the ultimate cause-that-is-not-
a-subject,”71 the always-displaced and unaainable center of the labyrinth of
bureaucratic control and exploitation, the infinitely receding dynamism
whi Deleuze and Guaari recognize as Kronos72 in perhaps his most
pernicious guise as the Kaaesque, impersonal systemic structure, with the
academy as one of his primary domains of efficacy, so that real learning can
only take place within academia in spite of its pervasion by Capital, though
it does in fact take place.
Even as respected a Deleuzean as Todd May told an interviewer that he
has “never heard of Jung being influential” on Deleuze, and he would think
that “Jung’s influence, if any, would be marginal,” despite the numerous
explicit affirmations of Jung in Deleuze and Guaari’s writing.73 Given that
May dismisses psyoanalysis in general in this same interview, perhaps he
simply overlooked the passages on Jung in at least nine separate texts, whi
May presumably must have read in order to write his excellent introduction
to Deleuze. Alternately, perhaps psyoanalytic repression is precisely the
concept required to account for this apparent amnesia common among some
Deleuzeans, a phenomenon certainly not limited to May. Or perhaps he is
merely engaging in conceit, not wanting to associate Deleuze with Jung’s
interest in occult modes of thought, one of a surprisingly large contingent of
Deleuzeans who somehow construct Deleuze as an exclusively anti-formal,
anti-teleological materialist, completely ignoring, or conveniently forgeing,
his profound and sustained engagements with mythology, synronicity,
aretypes, sorcery, astrology, and destiny. As Joshua Ramey aptly observes,
Deleuze “stands as a contemporary avatar of Western esoteric or ‘hermetic’
thought” adding that,

despite vast evidence that many Western philosophers – both ancient

and modern – have been invested in some sort of spirituality (be it
theurgical, thaumaturgical, mystical, alemical, kabalistic, or
theosophical), thinkers explicit about their hermetic or esoteric
proclivities have always been positioned as bastard and nomadic
outliers of philosophy.74
However, emboldened partially by Stengers’ exhortation that “to refuse to be
bored when writing also means trusting the reader,”75 it is one project of the
present text to draw out the influence of Jung and the Hermetic tradition on
Deleuze and Guaari, an extraction whi Hillman’s work particularly
facilitates, in order to assist the many occultists, animists, and wiccans, the
alemists, mystics, and astrologers among academics who work in
continental, pragmatist, and process thought, in finding the courage, as well
as the funding (whi is almost the same thing in our current societal
epo), to venture out of the epistemological closet.
It might also be suggested that, despite the many developments in
feminism and queer theory over the last few decades, the wariness of some
putatively “serious” philosophers about engaging with Jung’s work may
have to do with the perceived “feminine” quality of his thought, a gendered
trivialization whi Emily Herring has discussed in relation to Bergson’s
many female admirers, entwined with the historical association of intuition
and the occult with femininity, whi bears striking similarities to the figure
of the beautiful soul.76 Whereas Freud wrote about the Primal Father, Moses,
and phallic symbols, and most of his primary early followers were men,
Jung emphasized Mary and Sophia, the aretypal Great Mother, and the
anima, and his primary early followers were women, humorously
designated the Jungfrauen (“Jung-women,” but also “virgins”).77 e
patriaral tenor of Freud’s psyology is deeply intertwined with
reductionist materialism and rationalism, with the order, defensiveness, and
anality of the Senex, while Jung’s psyology is primarily engaged with
imagination, intuition, affect, emotion, desire, and the body, all associated
with femininity in their repression by the patriaral mode whi requires
their hierarical subjection to manufacture its dominant oppositional
identity. is gendered binarity is starkly visible in the primarily male
enrollment in graduate programs for (predominantly analytic) philosophy
and (monotheistically oriented) religion in contrast with the primarily
female enrollment in most of the other disciplines in the humanities and
social sciences, including psyology, sociology, English, and art history, for
whi continental theory oen informs the primary approaes. Ea
academic discipline emphasizes certain aretypal complexes, their
particular psyological perspectives and modes of constructing knowledge
and learning, embedded in its founding premises at the expense of other
potencies. Philosophy particularly tends to privilege a heroic “masculine”
purity and solitary intellectual asceticism while esewing more collective,
relational, and embodied modes long associated with the “feminine,” whi
have their aracteristic bodily gestures and aesthetic styles in addition to
their more abstract conceptual modes, their association with the patient
weaving of Athena, the digesting of Demeter, the nursing of Artemis.
And it is certainly the case that, although there are many men interested
in various occult activities, these activities have oen been denigrated as
tender-minded “feminine” pursuits not worthy of the tough-minded, oen
misogynist, masculinity whi still pervades academia and the broader
culture, even among solars, both men and women, gay and straight, who
read feminist and queer theorists and are deeply sympathetic to the political
and social valences of feminism and gender studies. is hierarical
privileging of a skeptical, disenanted mode of thought intimately
entwined with the patriaral privileging of masculinity over femininity,
whi seems partially to motivate the strangely reductive misreadings of
Deleuze as a materialist against anything resembling idealism, rather than as
a primary theorist contributing to the overcoming of this duality, and the
dominance of duality in general, is a lingering domain that requires
deconstruction aer the essential, and continuing, deconstructions of
identity related to gender, sexuality, race, class, geography, and ability. In
fact, Deleuze, perhaps more than any other theorist, renders this
deconstruction thinkable within the main streams of academic discourse.
e anima is the aretype of personifying itself, enacting the relation
with the persons of the unconscious, including the shadow, luring the ego
through projection and desire to engage with the disparate potencies in the
process of the individuation of the Self, whi Hillman recognizes as a
fictional narrative construction, as are the concepts of ego and unconscious,
emphasizing this relational field as a psyodramatics whi composes us.
Hillman’s privileging of dramatization over the Freudian psyodynamic
mode, whi discerns the psye as composed of “a field of forces,” can be
conceived as a transitional reversal, so that the predominant physical
metaphor can be integrated with the metaphor of metaphorical narrativity
itself, as well as the Deleuzoguaarian image of the factory with its
mainic assemblages, in a mode whi emerges from the pervasive
correspondences between these imaginal domains, partially constituted in
their contrasting difference. In this mode, our personal psyological
complexes are “complex persons”78 who demand expression across orders,
both physical and imaginal, in the most concrete domains of aritectural
construction or bodily emotion and in the most abstract domains of concept
and logic. All experiential domains can be conceived as expressions of
personal potencies whi are never encountered in their totality, whi
infinitely recede as we approa them, and whi form the groundless
imaginal ground of both mind and world. ese simulacral images are
paradoxically in us as mu as we are in them, like dreamers who inhabit
their dreams, whi are also experienced as internal to their psyes.
As mu as any other figure, Jung has allowed us to take seriously the
persons of pathology, encountered in the sizophrenia of his patients, as
well as in his own semi-intentional sizophrenizing, whi he described as
“doing a sizophrenia,”79 in his “confrontation with the unconscious” aer
his publication of Psychology of the Unconscious in 1912. is book partially
precipitated his expulsion from Freudian psyoanalysis, and his descent
into a sustained active imagination of the spontaneously arising figures of
Elijah, Philemon, and Salome over the course of the teens, recorded in The
Red Book, and generating many of his most profound conceptions expressed
over the subsequent decades. Rather than judging and categorizing these
encountered figures, in both himself and his patients, as merely insane
delusions, his work has greatly contributed to the liberation of modern
psyology from its monocentric rationalist enclosures, allowing
engagement with the full range of actual polycentric psyic experience,
encountered in its more extreme forms as demonic possession, multiple
personalities, speaking in tongues, automatic writing, and personality
dissociation. Jungian psyology has enacted a dialectical return on a more
expansive order of differentiation to the animistic, hermetic, and mystical
engagements with metaphysical others, an unambiguous precursor to the
Deleuzean mythical dialectic, and to sizoanalysis. is mode recognizes
that we are all several, all constituted in a multiplicity, and that
sizophrenia, a concept created lile more than a century ago to name the
phenomena of psyic division, fracturing, dismemberment, and dissolution
known since pre-antiquity, is an expression of the multiple persons of the
unconscious, repressed by egoic rationality, demanding to be heard rather
than psyiatrically narcotized further into submission, though psyiatric
drugs have their place.
Hillman discerns a twentieth-century decentering of totalitarian egoic
control countervalent to fascist totalitarianism, not only in the conceptual
invention of sizophrenia in psyology, but in the fracturing and
dislocating developments of modern painting, music, and literature, and in
the emergence of a multiplicity of countercultures. is pluralist decentering
is also visible in the common comparison of our era to the fall of the Roman
Empire, the pagan, barbarian invasion of the persons of the Dionysian
unconscious whi Nietzse evoked against the dominance of what
Hillman calls the modern “Empire of the Roman Ego,”80 the strengthening of
egoic consciousness advocated by Freud as a “dogma” and “unshakable
bulwark” against “the bla tide of mud of occultism,” as he expressed it to
Jung in 1910. Jung interpreted this bla tide as encompassing “virtually
everything that philosophy and religion, including the rising contemporary
science of parapsyology, had learned about the psye,” with Freud
aempting to impose an anti-theological theology as doctrine, whi Jung
designates as the primary factor “that stru at the heart of our friendship,”81
leading to their break a few years later. Hillman recognizes this totalitarian
centrality of the ego as an “imperialistic fantasy”82 intimately related to the
actual military and economic imperialism of modern Europe and the United
States, whi have generally sought to repress and erase not only the
languages and cultures of the dominated people, but also their oen
polytheistic religions, with Christian missionaries imposing the monotheistic
mode of consciousness on peoples in Asia, Africa, Australia, and the
Americas.
Hillman recognizes that “when the dominant vision that holds a period of
culture together cras, consciousness regresses into earlier containers,
seeking sources for survival whi also offer sources of revival,”83 a
collective enactment across scale of the common regression to ildhood and
animality in individual pathology as a means of escape from the excessive
demands of the ego, whi is less a degradation of nonmodern cultures than
a recognition that the gis of ildren and nonhuman animals are equal to
those of human adults. e imaginal whi Jung initially endeavored to
liberate from within the psyoanalytic empire, a task whi ultimately led
him beyond the imperial borders, is “the greatest enemy of dogma,”84
providing the opening to a potential renewal into more differentially
integrated individuations. e twentieth-century fall of the impeding empire
of ego, a fall evidently still in progress, is just su a craing and regression,
partially constituted in a Dionysian “return to Greece,”85 to a polytheistic
mode of consciousness resonant with the polycentric Hellenic resurgence of
the Renaissance aer the Apollonian monocentrism of the Christian Middle
Ages, and with the polytheistic spirit of Romanticism in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries aer the monocentric rationality of the
Enlightenment. is return is especially evident in the sixties counterculture,
whi has oen been compared to those earlier eras, aer the normalizing
conformity of the postwar order. e return to Hellenic polytheism is a
differentiating fragmentation serving as a reviving precursor to a polycentric
“disintegrated integration” beyond previous monocentric integrations, a
deterritorialization inseparable from more expansive and inclusive
reterritorializations for whi the aretypes provide primary imaginal
elements. is return is in fact “a regressive death wish,”86 a death of the
modern by returning to the imaginal fantasy of ildhood, and the
ildhood of Western culture in the Hellenic, the Renaissance, and the
Romantic. It is a dissolution of the static and dependable worlds that these
eras were required to transform, both dangerously vulnerable and radically
open to novel emergences, a psyic death on a mass scale, generally
accompanied by real mass fatality – Bla Death and Renaissance, Fren
Revolution and Romanticism, World War II and the sixties counterculture,
and perhaps now global pandemic and the still barely discernible glimmer of
a positive renascence, a novel iteration in a series of transformative deaths-
and-rebirths.
Hillman evokes Nietzse’s discussion of the intimate intertwining of
death and the Renaissance in the recognition that rebirth requires death,
decay, pathology, and degeneracy.87 ere is no rebirth without catastrophe
and its accompanying misery and despair, recalling Deleuze’s desert island
emerging from the Flood, no integration without differentiating
disintegration. And the more brilliant and transformative the awakening,
the darker the depths, as “revival emerges from the threat to survival and is
not a oice of something preferable.”88 One of the primary imaginal dramas
in Renaissance Neoplatonism is the abduction of Persephone by Hades, the
myth around whi the major mysteries of Eleusis were constructed, so that
the initiate, whether Eleusinian or Hermetic, is drawn down into the
underworld of death and obscurity, of secrecy and psyic interiority, the
aotic unconscious from whi transformation emerges. is initiatory
descent, or a clustered series of descents, occurs whenever collective entities,
whether individuals or cultures with their multiplicities of complexes, find
themselves at a border between epoal durations, the creative breakdown
of the old order from whi a novel order emerges, the death of the Middle
Ages and the birth of the modern, or the death of the modern and the birth
of a discontinuously novel epo whi cannot yet be decisively named.
Although the monotheistic mode of consciousness cannot be completely
abandoned and rejected any more than can the ego itself, “the Christ vehicle
no longer carries”89 the primary pathologizing requirements of our
“Western” cultures, does not provide the resources for overcoming the
apparently epoal crisis in whi we are engaged. It is precisely the
exclusivist dominance of this monocentric consciousness whi has brought
us to this crisis, a necessary differentiation of egoic rationality in modernity,
perhaps correlated with the Kronos-Apollo complex, whi now demands an
iconoclastic dissolution in the Dionysian aos not only of Greek and
Renaissance polytheism, as Hillman emphasizes, but in the multiplicity of
potencies imagined by indigenous cultures, speculative fictions, and non-
Western religions and mythologies. In fact, the “Greece” to whi we return
is itself a diverse epo, both temporally from the Minoan to the Hellenistic,
and spatially from Asia Minor to Sicily, a fantasy serving as a myth for our
imaginal constructions, eoing its own myths situated in its far past. e
differential mythical repetitions that constitute the Western tradition can be
traced from the myths of the gods and heroes, to the mythologization of the
figures of the ancient Greeks themselves, to the diaronic reenactments of
these myths in the eras of Neoplatonism, the Renaissance, Romanticism, and
even the sixties, whi has joined these other eras as a horizon for imaginal
projective elicitation, even by those who lived through it, with its own semi-
divine intellectual and artistic heroes, its Deleuzes and Dylans, who embody
the mythical potencies for future repetitions. Even the philosophical
tradition is a kind of mythology, exemplified in the particular pantheon of
conceptual personae traced in these apters, whose works offer infinite
objects of study and inspiration, so that we can only ever approa a full
understanding of any great philosopher’s thought.
As Hillman observes, the figures who created the mythical image of
“Greece” oen had only a tenuous connection to the actual place and
culture. Petrar did not read Greek despite his singularly influential
elevation of its literature, and Winelmann, Racine, Goethe, Hölderlin,
Hegel, Heine, Keats, and Nietzse never traveled to Greece, a la of literal,
direct engagement with the object of their veneration whi perhaps
enabled the creative freedom of their reconstructions, an imaginal domain of
potencies, though given depth and structure by its intertwining with the
historical, textual, and geographical actualities around whi this imaginal
mythos is constructed. e image of Greece, or its successive repetitions, is
neither merely a literal object for rigorous historical and araeological
reconstruction nor a fantasy fabricated out of thin air, but an imaginal
complex whi, like Freudian ildhood traumas, the mythological gods, or
the unconscious itself, inhabits a liminal and paradoxical domain whose
ontological status cannot be fixed, evincing an undecidability whi allows
it to serve as the privileged site of novel integrations, the Deleuzean “ancient
mythical present.”
For modern people, psyopathology is a primary site of the return to the
imaginal mode that exceeds the neat enclosures of the domains designated
by art and play, always engaged with in the mode of conceit, instead seeping
into the actual lived experience of the person who undergoes the pathology,
becoming not a “mere” fantasy that they can banish at will, but a
phantasmic other with whom they must contend. ese phantasms can take
the form of a spouse or family member who has died, or an aspect of the
person’s self with whom they must relate as other, both pathologies
motivated by an affect so intense, the feeling of loss or some region of their
own aracter or biography so intolerable, that they must exteriorize these
affects in imaginal figures as a means of psyological protection. Sometimes
the trauma is so intense that this protective spliing is as far as the person
can go, maintaining a tenuous balance. But these are the psyic persons to
whom one experiencing su a pathology must relate if they hope to resolve
the spliing in a psyic integration whi is not merely a repression of the
other, but a differentiation from the lost other or the traumatic scene in their
biography as actually other, whi paradoxically allows them to recognize
the other who was wearing the mask of the lost loved one or the abuser as
one person constituting their interior drama. And this spliing can be
engaged in intentionally as active imagination, Hamlet’s method in the
madness, so that although the psyic other does not always force itself
against our will, when it is intentionally evoked, it asserts itself as
expressing an elusive but insistent reality that cannot be dismissed. e
encounters that take place with others in nonordinary states of
consciousness, whether spontaneously arising or intentionally produced by
breathing, fasting, wilderness isolation, bodily movement, or the ingestion of
psyoactive compounds, impose the undeniable and persistent sense that
the beings encountered, however fleetingly, were real, existing in the liminal
space between our internal psye and the world experienced as external.
ese encounters with the liminal others that constitute the psye,
whether in dreams, sizophrenia, or psyonautic explorations, figures
whi demand to be named like Adam naming all of the animals so that he
can become conscious of their qualities in himself, demand a differentiation
of the potencies that our individuality expresses as a precondition for their
individuated integration. Hillman quotes Jung’s dictum that “only separated
things can unite,”90 though this uniting is not a mere return to totalitarian
identity, but a pluralist and democratic grassroots coalition whi serves as
the teleological lure of an immanent pathologizing. All of these modes of
personifying are dramatizations of the problems and questions that
construct our conceptual and affective horizons, oen as conflict between
opposed or incommensurable perspectives or desires. ey enact the
constantly shiing alliances and rivalries of the autonomous agencies who
constitute our habit of personal identity associated with a particular body
and a particular life, performing the recognition that we are an interior
multiplicity rather than identifying exclusively with the monocentric ego,
repressing the persons who compose us and forcing them to be encountered
externally as objects of conflict, fear, or desire. And this projection of the
repressed persons who dramatically enact our individuality takes place not
only in individuals, but in the collective psye as the othering of different
races, nations, genders, and sexualities leading to hierarical dominance,
and to the periodic atrocities that these dominations require.
What is called for, then, is an overthrowing of the totalitarian Kronos,
who devours the others in his egomania, by the gods whom Zeus leads not
as an absolute dictator, but as the principal actor in an ensemble cast who
generally requires the participation and assent of those he leads, who is
responsible to their requirements and responsive to their dissent. And these
gods are not merely conceptual, but actually encountered potencies in their
multiplicity of masks who demand to be heard, and even adored or served,
who require our active relation if we hope to preclude provoking their
destructive ire as painful symptoms and fatal encounters. But even when the
gods are recognized in their autonomous reality, suffering cannot be
avoided, as the pain of dissolution and regression, of breakdown and
depression, is a prerequisite for the concrescence of these potencies in a
more expansive integration beyond ego’s dominance rather than these
potencies being indefinitely repressed in the unconscious. It is not possible to
emerge from a habitual and repressive monocentric orthodoxy into a novel
and vital mode of polycentric relation, whether on individual or collective
orders, without undergoing an initiatory ordeal of dismemberment and
descent. As Hillman recognizes in 1964’s Suicide and the Soul, the
pathological fantasy of suicide is a literalization of the drive toward a
transformative death of the ego, as there is no rebirth without death, no
integration without disintegration, and even when a novel integration
occurs, the gods subsist in their oen discordant multivalence, demanding to
be actualized and expressed in a multiplicity of affective and conceptual
modes, both revelatory and torturous, both positing and negating.
Integration is not an overcoming of suffering, but a paradoxically liberating
discernment of the potencies who demand our respect, and sometimes even
our submission.
If Kronos is the primary potency, in alliance with Apollo, who imprisons
in the monocentric ego, Hermes, the trister of Greek mythology, carries
the messages of the gods whi arrive not as clear and distinct mandates,
but in a sizoid, mercurial style that “thrives in plural meanings, in cryptic
double-talk, in escaping definitions, in not taking heroic commied stances,
in ambisexuality, in psyically detaed and separated body parts.” is
description is strikingly evocative of Deleuze and Guaari, as is Hillman’s
evocation of a “self-division, dismemberment, and a flowing multiplicity”91
aracteristic of Dionysus. One might almost suspect that Hillman is
implicitly referring to the Fren theorists, though it is more likely that they
encountered the same dynamisms, wrote the dreams of the same gods,
encountered as persons who recede through an infinite regress of masks as
they are approaed. e verbal concepts of philosophical or psyological
thought – whether dynamisms, potencies, Ideas, or aretypes – are
secondarily derived from divine and demonic images and modes of
consciousness as instruments for their differentiation in a mythical dialectic
integrating the conceptual and the imaginal, whi can serve to carry the
system of the gods repressed in the unconscious ba to the realm of
memoria where it resided in the Renaissance. But as witnessed not only in
obscurantist Fren theory, but in those who return from imaginal or
psyonautic explorations, articulating the experienced domains and
encounters to those who have not yet undergone su experiences can be
allenging, as clear and distinct language can only be applied to those
experiences whi are already accounted for within the existing sign
systems aracterizing the seled cultural orthodoxy of common sense.
Heterodox experiences require the creation of novel forms of language,
obscure and paradoxical concepts, as well as complex metaphorical
evocations whi cannot be reduced to the conceptual, to be expressed.
e resituation of ego from a totalitarian monocentrism – like Heracles
heroically wrestling the multi-headed beast Cerberus into submission amidst
the confused phantasms of Hades (and despite his Eleusinian preparations
for this final labor) – to a plural polycentrism requires that we take imaginal
experience as seriously as physical repeatability rather than constructing
imagination as merely amorphous play or fantasy with no significant
relation to the real world, as confusion to be violently explained away. We
must give sustained collective aention to “the differentiation of the
imaginal,” to the complex, shiing structures and laices of affective,
intuitive, and phantasmal experience in a more expansive empiricism, to
narrative dramatizations of potencies enacted through tortuous geometrical
and topological relations. is differential synronistic repetition enacting
the eternal return of aretypal situations demonstrates its own “laws and
necessities”92 not susceptible to a monocentrically repeatable empiricism,
but to a radically pluralist empiricism whi engages with all of our
faculties, not only a putatively objective rationality. We encounter the
persons behind pathologies through this transformative narrativity, and we
must aend to what these personified potencies have to say. Deemphasizing
the medical model in whi a mental illness is diagnosed, and a treatment
produces a cure, the oen confining “heroic fantasy” of the doctor whi
seeks to tame the gods by imprisoning them within the nominalist
designations of various disorders, may paradoxically offer a way of healing
the pathologies whi are surface expressions, masks of the infinitely
receding persons in the depths. As the ancients understood: “e same God
who constellates an illness is the one who can take it away.”93
Although there certainly may be cases with primarily physical etiologies
that can only respond to medical intervention, and the heroic aretype is as
valid and necessary as any other, moving beyond the exclusively medical
model of psyiatry to address both primary meanings of “psye,” to heal
the imaginally oriented soul and not only the rationally contained mind,
may allow for the resolution of previously intractable disorders, not as an
ultimate solution for suffering, but in a sustained engagement with the
purposive powers behind the symptoms enabling the tonal shi into more
profound and expansive degrees of freedom. is approa has found great
success in many individual cases, for one primary instance in the work of
Stanislav Grof, but it cannot aain its full efficacy until the pathologies that
affect us on a collective scale, manifesting as climate ange, patriary,
racism, economic inequality, and global pandemic, as well as anxiety,
addiction, and depression, are seen through by society at large, by the
emergent multiplicity that we constitute. e pragmatic means of expanding
this pluralist and constructivist mode of radical, transcendental empiricism
beyond isolated individuals and pioneering “heroic” communities of solars
or practitioners, usually located at the institutional margins, must be
envisioned and created, a heroic act partially constituted in releasing
aament to the exclusivist heroic fantasy, or even the fantasy of the sage
who dispenses occult wisdom only to worthy aspirants in the oen subtle
authoritarianism of spiritual discipline. As Hillman writes, “the autonomy of
fantasy is the soul’s last refuge of dignity, its guarantor against all
oppressions,”94 and although a few individuals may serve as the conceptual
personae who express and embody a novel mode whi enables imaginal
autonomy in a way that can actually infect and populate the central nodes
of discursive power, this novelty is ultimately a collective construction built
from countless differential compositions of words and personal relations.
is construction enacts a wave in whi ea of us serves as a single
droplet, though as James recognized, some of us will inevitably serve as
“forerunners” who are “flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a
wavecrest.”95
Like Jung, Hillman recognizes alemy as a predecessor to aretypal
psyology, as it integrates, however nascently and imperfectly, the “intense
discipline, with ethical devotion to their work, careful formulae, and high
purposes” typically considered the province of scientific empiricism or
religious monasticism with a radical imaginal “freedom and diversity, with
full place for the bizarre and heretical,”96 esewing the literalist demand of
repeatability. As alemy’s most sophisticated practitioners understood,
psyic time is a complex and tortuously involuted domain discernible in
moods as mu as in concrete events, and not the static, neutral, linear
movement reductively extracted from this more expansive manifold. ose
aspects of experience beyond the solely physical are not meanically
reproducible, as ea duration expresses a different qualitative milieu
describable as the complex relationality of aretypes. e dramatic method
descended from alemy is oriented toward the “precise differentiation of
qualities” through their slow, patient, vegetative digestion, rather than by
means of a brisk and impatient “measurement of quantities,”97 iteratively
circulating through a particular complex, like the philosopher who eternally
returns to the same open and evolving system of verbally constructed
concepts in order slowly and painstakingly to elicit subtle novelties and
nomadic variations on a thematic terrain.
As with the process of individuation, the alemical opus begins with the
imaginal, the primary material in the enclosing alembic into whi the
alemist’s depths are projected with an intensely smoldering aention
externalized in the carefully tended fire, not progressing linearly toward a
fixed result, but infinitely lured by interstitial, labyrinthine potencies, both
uncannily alien and intimately familiar. e purpose of both alemy and
personifying is the learning that occurs in the process of pathologizing, “an
integral, necessary aspect of soul-making,”98 the aotic dissolution and
dismemberment of dominant egoic structures to create novel modes for
expressing a deeper aotic order in actuality through an imaginal
naturalism for whi “the differentiations that stand out sharply one day
may recede into the underbrush or behind a cloud the next.”99 It is a
constantly renegotiated integration of Apollonian and Dionysian in a
reciprocally generated aosmos, a “slightest ange of tone” in whi
events and persons are encountered as pervasively informed by the gods.
e networks of lines and structures whi constitute our daily consensual
reality remain initially unanged, but the differentiating shades revealed
within and behind these now-transparent “flatland” apparitions constitute
the introduction of a novel degree of expressive freedom, a tonal shi whi
subtly, but fundamentally and inexorably, transforms the collective modes of
relation.
e anima, whi lures us toward more lovingly animated modes in a
personification of the unconscious, the felt interiority imaginally projected
into the mirror of others as objects of desire, affection, fantasy, or veneration
(etymologically derived from Venus), has been variously figured not only as
the goddess of love, but in the wisdom of Sophia, the compassion of the
Virgin Mary, the destruction and renewal of Persephone, and the inspiration
of the Muses. ese figures lure us toward individuation, so that in the
initial stage of projection, that whi we desire seems to reside in the
projected other, whether as human or nonhuman object, until the objectified
person of a fancied lover or the personified object of a coveted possession
are encountered in their complex actuality, disrupting the smooth surface
whi served the narcissistic reflection, drawing us into the depths to
encounter the gi of real otherness, a submerged, interior domain of beauty
and danger where we can venture but not abide. is withdrawal of
projection differentiates the anima as an encountered potency from the
temporary object into whi she is projected, whi allows us to love the
other in their alien subjectivity rather than reductively incarcerating them in
a corner of what we imagine, engaging in “the personalistic fallacy,”100
constructing anima as a psye that we possess, whi paradoxically causes
her to possess us, rather than as a collective whi we express and whi
constitutes our individuality. e anima whi, as Hillman quotes Jung,
“cannot be completely integrated with”101 our consciousness in an
undifferentiated identity, teaes us that animism is a more realistic mode of
relation than the violent depersonalization of everything outside the mind
into mere objective materiality perpetrated by Cartesian rationalism, despite
Descartes’ good intentions. In this animistic mode, encountered others, both
human and nonhuman, are recognized as genuinely other rather than as
merely illusory narcissistic projections. e fantasy of anima is a deeper
form of imaginal constructive elicitation than the simplistic fantasy of a
radical separation of subject and object still dominant in late modernity, a
fantasy whi science and analytic philosophy generally take for granted,
oen myopically constraining the scope of what, or more precisely whom,
they can envisage.
When these imaginal persons are repressed in the unconscious, they
revolt as pathologies, as disorders and their symptoms, so that
depotentiation can never be finally accomplished, but can only succeed in
differentiating egoic rationality, a necessary and epoal aievement, but
one whi has come at the expense of eliciting the most destructive and
painful expressions of gods who do not appreciate being imprisoned and
ignored. A lover or spouse will never fulfill our boomless desire for the
anima, a father or mentor will never satisfy our infinite requirement for the
Senex, an enemy or rival will never slake our martial thirst for blood.
Salutary relations with other people can occur when we withdraw the
idolatrous and fetishizing projections from these others to discern the anima
as an other that I am. e aempt to replace the gods with the worship or
demonization of other persons, to experience salvation in a lover or
damnation in a seducer, is the reason why person-centered psyotherapy in
its multiplicity of forms, despite the best intentions of a whole profession of
psyologists, exhibits a limited efficacy.102 e term “abnormal
psyology”103 is wildly erroneous, as nothing is more normal in our present
epo than anxiety and depression, deficits of aention and obsessive
compulsions, dissociation and delusion, paranoia and addiction. Overcoming
the pervasive pathologies of modern life that we all experience to some
degree, without exception, requires that we collectively release the
resistance to the occult stream of modern thought running through figures
like Spinoza, Leibniz, Selling, Hegel, Nietzse, James, Bergson, and
Deleuze, despite the tacit, but relatively pervasive, conspiracy of silence
about this conceptual complex in the discourse of academics who otherwise
revere these figures as central and canonical in the continental tradition.
is overcoming requires engagement with the ambiguous reality of the
gods and other powers intimately woven into the thought of these
philosophers, though these potencies are generally neglected in discussions
of their work, or reduced to mere allegory or conceit.
Personifying allows for an overcoming of the doubting cosmic isolation of
the Cartesian ego through a rigorously aieved trust in the imaginal reality
of psyic persons, unbloing occulted aention to the persistent felt
knowledge that individuals are accompanied by a multiplicity of potencies
who constitute their individual “fate,”104 not only in the form of gods, but in
the haunting by loved ones who have passed, of ancestors, of historical and
fictional persons with whom the aretypal complexes that define the
potentialities and constraints of ea individual life resonate. ese
potencies speak through the individual persona so that egoic individuality is
itself a personifying politically negotiated by the psyic collective, whether
in a democratic or authoritarian mode. Personifying constitutes an
inhabiting of the “middle position”105 – resonant with Deleuze’s recognition
that “every multiplicity grows from the middle”106 – of the relation between
self and others aracteristic of animism and mythology, not a return to
identity, but to a polycentric multiplicity in the more expansive form of
dialectic. is integral dialectic recognizes that self and world, soul and
spirit, spirit and maer, East and West, South and North, mediate necessary
differentiations whi have temporarily been hierarically emphasized,
requiring not primarily a reconciliation in a return to unity through the via
negativa of a spirit whi solemnly intones that “straight is the gate and

narrow is the way,”107 but an affirmation that these dualities contain limited
efficacy, and that they can be integrated as contrasts within a more
expansive and labyrinthine pluralism whose interstitial horizons are only
partially constructed from these intensive binaries. e imaginal
personifying of a Dionysian psye, with its profusion of spirits, is
differentiated from the singular Apollonian spirit with whi psye has
oen been conflated in opposition to maer, serving as the aosmic
narrative intertextuality that allows for the dissolution and overcoming of
duality in an enactment of these gods learning to speak ea other’s
languages, two brothers carrying on their vehement and sustained
conversation in a corner while the Bacanalian revel rages around them.
Like the literalizations of oppositional metaphysics and theology, therapy
is a ritualistic game whi tends to literalize the gods as clinical disorders to
be cured rather than as imaginal potencies to be encountered, a binary
relation of therapist and patient whi itself enacts the aretypal fantasy of
the wounded healer for whi the healer must heal their own wounds by
undergoing an initiatory ordeal before they can mediate this initiatory self-
healing for others. In the case of most modern therapy, however, this
aretype, of whi both the centaur Chiron and Christ who heals through
his crucifixion are expressions, is split into a hierarical duality, with the
therapist literalized as the healer while the patient literalizes the wound
rather than both parties enacting this polarity as a potency whi exceeds
and constitutes their relational individualities. e literalizing division of the
aretypes produces the persistent and oen unresolvable problems of
therapy, the transferences and countertransferences, the resistances and
defense meanisms. is static binarity can only be overcome not in the
eradication of the pathology whi prompted the therapy, but in the
revolutionary recognition of, and intentional engagement with, the gods
behind the pathologies as destiny, as immanent lures toward the liberated
creative expression across orders of the faculties elicited by these potencies,
rather than as an unconscious fate to whi the individual is perpetually
subjected.
Teleological development, progress, individuation, evolution, and growth
into more expansive domains of relation is one set of aretypal complexes
among others, whi can be associated with the nurturing and nourishing
“Great Mother”108 aretype figured as Gaia, Demeter, Hera, and Cybele, but
also with Zeus in his expansive and bountiful munificence (though Hera
might provide a different perspective on his profligate infidelities, the
lawgiver’s arrogant flouting of his marital duties, whi he in turn
experiences as inhibiting his creative freedom), and with the Apollonian
ascent toward unity or the Dionysian will to power. ese complexes cannot
be generalized to all psyological situations as therapy oen seeks to do,
though neither can the potencies associated with these complexes be
completely dismissed as merely facile wish-fulfillment, the derisive claim of
the tough-minded rejections of progressive unity and holistic growth
ambiguously figured in the denouncement of the beautiful soul.
Nevertheless, like progress, pathology is one essential mode of imaginal
discernment, so that the disintegrations of illness, woundedness, and
madness, and even the fantasies of incest, torture, and murder (though not
their literalization), are just as integral to a mythically informed polycentric
dialectic as are the integrations of healing, saving, and homecoming, of love,
revelation, and bliss. ere is no integration without differentiation, whether
clinical or catastrophic, and all of the gods must be honored, however alien
or disagreeable to our individual aracters, to the particular constructions
of multiplicity whi constitute us, and from whi no potency can
ultimately be excluded.
e complex of hierarical and paternalistic subjection is evident not
only in therapy, but perhaps especially in the political realm. Mental health
oen means nothing more than thinking in accordance with the “specific
ideology of compliant middle-class humanism,”109 whi pervades the
domains of law, medicine, education, and governmental policy, enforcing the
repression and denial of the gods encountered in pathology and madness
through the figures of police and judge, doctor and therapist, teaer and
administrator, bureaucrat and politician, rendering the envisaging of the
reality and autonomy of potencies as pathological (in this term’s solely
negative inflection) outside the constraining enclosures of marginal religious
or therapeutic communities.110 ese forces of discipline, punishment, and
control, oen despite the best intentions of those fulfilling these roles, who
are themselves subject to these forces, aggressively and coercively occlude
the recognition of the multiplicity of persons who constitute us in the
central nodes of discourse for whi we all must act the role of unified egoic
individuals who can be judged, treated, educated, and legislated. is violent
and multifarious enforcement of monocentric consciousness keeps us
anxious, depressed, isolated, and afraid, rendering us exclusively subject to
Kronos, whom all of these patriaral figures embody, by means of the
denial, repression, and perhaps most effectively, the trivialization of the
personifying mode of thought.111 Employers, for one primary example,
almost always abuse their power in some way, as no maer how ethical and
egalitarian the person is who plays this role, the fact of having coercive
power over other adults is almost always destructive. is multivalent
aretype, for whom the various paternalistic figures are substitutes, forces
us into the reductive identities of subservient employee or capitalist
consumer, subordinating us to deadening ideologies rather than enabling the
engagement with living potencies, filling us up without providing sufficient
nourishment, possessing us and alienating us from our generative
psyological multiplicity, keeping us malnourished and soul-si.
It is impossible to overthrow an oppressor whom we cannot see or name,
who derisively dismisses our most profoundly felt concerns, our persistent
sense that something is wrong, reducing our capacity for discerning the
deeper significance of potencies to mere paranoia and the fantastic literalism
of conspiracy theory. rough an infinitely deferred series of surrogates, our
complaints and protests are gaslighted as insanity and delusion, or as mere
hypoondria and whining not suitable to the rigidity and oppressiveness of
the exclusively heroic style of consciousness, inextricably bound up with
violence and misogyny. is invisible oppressor places the onus of blame
and guilt for putative aracter flaws and moral failures (of career, marriage,
parenting) solely on the suffering individual in the guise of the superego, like
the great arer Philoctetes banished by Agamemnon during the Trojan War
for his persistent wound received, in one version of the story, as retribution
for one of Ailles’ violent and wrathful transgressions. As Gebser observes,
the wrath of Ailles in the first lines of the Iliad is a founding moment of
the rationality that would rea its peak in modernity.112
e initiatory step in overcoming this rationalized society of control, this
totalizing regime whi systematically represses the pathologizing through
whi the gods speak, is to reveal the hidden saturnine potency who obliges
our guilt and submission residing at its cold, brutal heart, not in the form of
the demonic delegates whom he possesses, but as the god himself. He is
never encountered alone, despite his solitude, but always in dramatic
relational complexes with other gods, especially in league with the anger
and violence of Ares, the harshly illuminated centrality of Apollo, a gang of
patriaral thugs (at least in this particular drama) vengefully returning
from their own repression in the unconscious violently to push the other
gods into the outer darkness. e Promethean and Dionysian abolition of
the modern policing of all areas of human experience cannot be a final
slaying of Kronos, a heroically liberating rejection of the negative, whi
Deleuze valiantly, though ambiguously, aempted, but a revolutionary,
transformative death and rebirth of this potency, reenacted in his more
positive and constructive valences within a rhizomatic multiplicity as
structure, maturity, discernment, and wisdom. His more destructive and
oppressive expressions are vengeance for us having forgoen him as, like all
gods, Kronos demands to be remembered – as in the ancient Greek festival
of Kronia and the Roman Saturnalia – Saturn presiding over the very act of
remembering and honoring debts to gods and ancestors, of fulfilling the
duties and obligations of tradition.
But this remembrance of the gods is not merely a return to nature, whi
Hillman calls “the naturalistic fallacy,” though like Selling, he recognizes
that the gods are correlated with various natural processes. e conception
of nature as an ideal norm to whi we should adhere is the expression of a
few potencies among many, the pristine, virginal Artemis or the maternal
Gaia mu discussed in relation to ecology, who certainly demand a radical
shi in our relation to the natural processes that constitute both the Earth
and our bodies. But an overly idealized and romanticized “naturalism soon
declines into materialism,”113 the privileging of the physical over the
imaginal, as the privileging of any domain is what must be precluded by the
mode whi seeks to integrate all domains in a polycentric pluralism rather
than a monocentric totality. Alemy is an opus contra naturam, a “work
against nature”114 imaginally dwelling with the bizarre and the monstrous of
pathology, perhaps most fully expressed by the figures and narratives of
mythology, in order to produce a transmutation both in the prima materia
and in the alemist’s depths. Nature is not an ideal unity, but a multiplicity
of complexly interacting forces correlated with the entire pantheon of
powers, so that the question posed to the oracles at Delphi and Dodona is
oen: “To what god or hero must I pray or sacrifice to aieve su and su
a purpose?”115 e deeper questions are not concerned with monocausal
explanations, but with whi gods must be remembered, honored,
propitiated, or enacted in ea dramatic situation, whether the agricultural
cultivation of the maternal Demeter, a human practice whi transforms the
nature from whi we emerge; the heroic Herculean conquering and
violence of the hunt or the exploration of new vistas beyond our seled
territories; the generative aos, intoxication, animality, and dismemberment
of Dionysus; or even the rational and meanistic order of Kronos presiding
over the planetary or atomic orbits in their mathematical harmony, but also
over melanoly, suffering, death, decay, and the negative. “Human being is
essentially ‘differing’ being,” and “the fundamental principle of psyological
life is differentiation,”116 as we are nature transforming itself by
differentiating itself, sometimes in torturous opposition with itself, in
concert with the disparate gods who constitute and inform both our
individualities and the worlds we inhabit and construct.
e devastation we have brought to the Earth cannot be reduced to the
pure goodness of nature and the debased evil of a sinful human culture, but
is perhaps the result of the unavoidable death of the gods in their mirth. is
epoal initiatory ordeal has been paradoxically necessary for the
differentiation of human autonomy in order to create the preconditions for
the novel expressions of these potencies in a dialectic whi is not a mere
return to a placid and undifferentiated identity and wholeness, but a rebirth
into the more expansive and intensive expressions of mythically
differentiated multiplicity integrated as the contrasting relational structures
and forces of a more efficacious and open polycentric totality. As Hillman
writes, “psyologically, the Gods are never dead,”117 and this death-and-
rebirth ordeal enacts not a mere return to ildhood innocence, but the
devastating immolation of self-centered adolescent rebellion creating the
precondition for a mature adulthood in whi the complex and allenging
adventures of negotiating the divinely correlated contours of durational
experience do not cease in a tranquil retirement, but are transposed into
deeper and higher expressions. us, the juvenile Oedipal reaction becomes
the monumental task of composing the definitive text against the Oedipal,
the fulfillment of a dramatic destiny in its most expansive register. Mythical
dramatizations enacting the complex relations of disparate potencies are not
prescribed compositions for whi the lines are already wrien, only
remaining to be recited with varying emphases and inflections, but radically
open improvisations and creative variations on thematic elements and
melodic refrains that are always shiing, never seled, employing
whiever masks and instruments are ready-to-hand in the fractured and
deformed mirror of psyic experience.
Personifying is not a cure for pathology, but the means of entrance into a
deeper game whose only precondition is that we aentively engage with the
differentiated potencies that constitute our immanent interiority. Paracelsus,
like many others in the Renaissance, associated these potencies with an
imaginal cosmography correlating the gods and the planets, revealing a
novel degree of freedom for our liberated exploration, the fluid medium of
depth reciprocally elicited by the invention of our own peculiar ways of
swimming toward the more expansive horizons constructed through this
paradoxical activity. Personifying enables the creation of novel concepts to
express more profound valences of Ideas, whi allow us to peer further into
the depths in a novel Copernican revolution whose polycentrism renders
visible a aosmos beyond the daylight illumination of egoic monocentrism
whi occults the wandering stars of our interiority. And this deepening is
oen enacted through the repetitious rumination and the depressive descent
associated with Kronos, the pathology against whi our culture most
manically defends, evident in the pervasiveness of antidepressants (an
admiedly reasonable pervasion in our current problematic context).
Depression is the psyological substitution for the Christian descent into
hell and the encounter with the Enemy, a descent into evil and sin whi
must be avoided at all costs by spreading the “good news” of Christ’s saving
resurrection. is is the very denial through the unification of a monocentric
reconciliation whi Nietzse railed against in his anti-Christian rebirth of
tragedy, liberating the polycentric Dionysian underworld where the soul is
transformed through the pathos of both passion and suffering.
But in identifying himself as Dionysus or e Crucified, Nietzse
perhaps made an error, though an understandable one given his pioneering
solitude and the la of collective modes of thought and concomitant
societal structures to contain his madness as generative aos rather than as
mere destructive disorder, modes and structures he did as mu as anyone to
construct.118 We do not only enact one divine role in an aretypal drama,
but rather the gods pervade the relational dramas of life, so that the
saturnine father who controls and punishes his ildren, psyologically
devouring them, is just as mu a victim of the punitive control of his
superego by whi he is devoured. And the embaled sensuality of a
passionate couple cannot be facilely reduced to a man embodying the god of
war and a woman enacting the goddess of love, as both parties in all kinds
of couples, of all gender combinations, partake of both eroticism and anger,
both seduction and assertion, the Greek Aphroditus (or Hermaphroditos)
and the Roman Venus Barbata figuring the goddess of love with the body
and dress of a woman, but with beard, phallus, and helmet, “secretly in love
with war.”119 By imaginally discerning these aretypal complexes of
potencies in the relationality not only among the individuals associated with
different bodies, but among the persons who constitute an individual psye,
rather than forcing an egoic identity with a particular aretype, the flat,
monoromatic literalism of any situation can be rendered transparent.
While the recurring struggle between father and ildren still occurs,
while the lovers still quarrel and reconcile, these activities are undertaken
with the ever-present sense that these are aretypal dramas eoing all of
the previous enactments of these complexes in an infinite regress along a
nonlocal series receding orthogonally into an additional degree of freedom,
the imaginal dimension of the boomless depths of memoria for whi the
temporal present is a lower-dimensional surface projection. Ea time we
enact the repetition of a complex potentiality, we have the opportunity to
create a novel fold in the texture of process, a differential iteration whi has
not yet existed in actuality, and whi thus returns in the eternal return,
while that whi is habitual and unconsciously automated does not return.
e typically familial Oedipal drama, replayed without awareness countless
times, fades away as soon as the lines are recited and the motions gone
through, while the composition of Anti-Oedipus becomes an enduring
aievement around whi new domains of activity, affect, and conception
can be constructively elicited, Hillman quoting Paul Ricoeur that “enigma
does not blo understanding but provokes it,”120 an enigmatic
constructivism whi reveals through obscurity, creates through destruction.
Nietzse’s error of overidentifying with single aretypes, Dionysus or
e Crucified, is not simply a moment that can be negated and discarded, as
errancy is integral to psyologizing, Hillman tarrying with the medieval
figure of the Knight Errant in resonance with the Deleuzoguaarian figure
of the nomad, and eoing Deleuze’s pronouncement that “the history of the
world is marked by the great figures of errancy: Odysseus, Don ixote, the
Wandering Jew.”121 e Knight Errant is not an epic hero linearly driven by
singleness of purpose, but a renegade against literalism, a rogue wanderer
lured by Eros and Ananke, the goddess beneath whose throne the eternally
circulating souls must pass in the Republic to receive their destiny,
embodying the “Errant Cause”122 of the Timaeus, the necessity of affective
and imaginal inclinations associated with disparate gods. is conception of
destiny leads through a nonlinear and nonlocal series of picaresque
narrative episodes in a process of learning enacting the positive
irresponsibility whi Deleuze designates as “Nietzse’s most noble and
beautiful secret,”123 the mandate to discover through error whi liberates
from the heavy burdens of guilt, sin, and judgment, and of forgiveness,
redemption, and exoneration, imposed by the “moralistic fallacy”124 of
controlling reason. is secret of imaginal irresponsibility beyond the
reductive, legislative morality of good and evil, the heavy egoic
responsibility of a totalizing humanism, is not merely a license to do
anything to anyone, as the Nazis imagined. It is an ethical stance deeply
resonant with Spinoza, whi recognizes that the will is determined by
divinely imposed affective and imaginal potencies: impulses, emotions, and
fantasies whi we do not oose, whi possess us more than we possess
them, but whi we are capable of freely oosing how to express if we
become conscious of their transpersonal otherness. Humanism, whether
Christian or secular and existential, places responsibility solely on the egoic
human to forgive and forget, but the gods who compose us through our
dramatic enactments rarely forgive, and they demand remembrance.
is errant perspective understands, like Hegel and Whitehead (with their
negative tarryings and negative prehensions), like Freud and Jung (with
their slips and free associations), that error is an integral aspect of becoming,
and that errancy coincides with problematically encountered potencies,
enacting a deconstruction and differentiated integration of the oppositions of
rational and irrational, purposive and purposeless. Irrational purposelessness
is a necessary complement to purposive rationality, but aos cannot be
reduced merely to serving a monocentric teleological order as error to be
rectified and eradicated in the totalizing fantasy of progressive reason,
relegated to the mere “shadow enemy of truth.”125 Rather, becoming
negotiates a complex and paradoxical destiny more profound than a mere
binary decision between ance and fate, Nietzse’s “iron hands of
necessity whi shake the dice-box of ance.”126 Hillman evokes this
paradoxical destiny as “the gi of an inhuman daimon who demands human
service”127 in a fictional aosmos from whi the binaries of aos and
order, ance and necessity, are extracted to construct the hierarical
privilegings of logocentric rationality, the “errant fantasy”128 violently
subjugated by the fantasy of pure reason. Roguish Dionysus and ivalric
Apollo are never encountered alone, but always engaged in intense relations
whose partial truths are inextricable from Hermetic duplicities,
equivocations, and confabulations. eir brother Hermes, the middle son of
Zeus in this triad, who carried and protected the infant Dionysus, serves as
intermediary, performing a discordant hermeneutic whi deepens by
unseling in a mongrel, deviant circulation at the liminal border between
the static determinism of order and the aleatory freedom of aos.
Notes
1. Hillman, Re-Visioning, xii.
2. See Hillman, Archetypal, 138–55.
3. Hillman, Archetypal, xii.
4. In “Ba to Beyond” (220–4) Hillman recognizes this aretypal
cosmology as going beyond the aretypal psyology of Re-Visioning
Psychology, a recognition particularly taken up by Riard Tarnas in
Cosmos and Psyche.
5. Hillman, Re-Visioning, x.
6. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 152.
7. Deleuze, Essays, 62; Deleuze, Cinema 2, 7, 104, 149.
8. Deleuze and Guaari, Thousand, 112.
9. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 36.
10. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 153.
11. Hillman, Puer Papers, 3–53.
12. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 128.
13. Deleuze, Essays, 129.
14. Heraclitus, Fragments, 71.
15. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 142.
16. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 134.
17. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 186.
18. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 97.
19. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 206.
20. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 14.
21. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 109.
22. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 14.
23. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 15.
24. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 186.
25. Hillman, Re-Visioning, xiii.
26. Jung, Archetypes, 30.
27. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 170–1.
28. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 222.
29. Hillman, Re-Visioning, xv.
30. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 139.
31. Deleuze, Desert, 9–14; Jung, Archetypes, 19.
32. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 109.
33. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 117–18.
34. Hillman, Re-Visioning, xvi.
35. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 140.
36. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 2.
37. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 156.
38. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 135.
39. Hillman, Re-Visioning, xvi.
40. Gebser, Origin, 151.
41. Stengers, “Beyond,” 246.
42. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 7.
43. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 84.
44. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 131.
45. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 360.
46. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 138.
47. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 106–7.
48. Nietzse, Gay, 167; Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 5.
49. Dosse, Intersecting, 8.
50. Deleuze, Two, 129.
51. Paon and Protevi, Deleuze, 188.
52. Deleuze, Essays, 129; Deleuze, Letters, 69.
53. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 224.
54. Deleuze and Guaari, Anti-Oedipus, 320.
55. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 63.
56. Deleuze, Two, 179.
57. Hegel, Mind, 143.
58. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 63.
59. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 112.
60. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 108.
61. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 61.
62. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 17.
63. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 18–19.
64. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 61.
65. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 19.
66. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 24.
67. Deleuze and Guaari, Thousand, 3.
68. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 22.
69. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 155.
70. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 22.
71. Fisher, Capitalist, 243; Deleuze, Desert, 178.
72. Deleuze and Guaari, Kafka, 67; Deleuze, Cinema 2, 81.
73. May, “Explain.”
74. Ramey, Hermetic, 3, 7.
75. Stengers, Thinking, 244.
76. Herring, “Bergson.” See Stengers, Another, 23–47.
77. Jung, Civilization, 484.
78. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 22.
79. Jung, Speaking, 233.
80. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 24.
81. Jung, Memories, 150, 155.
82. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 26.
83. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 27.
84. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 144.
85. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 27.
86. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 27.
87. Nietzse, Anti-Christ, 211–12.
88. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 207.
89. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 97.
90. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 31.
91. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 35.
92. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 37.
93. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 75.
 94. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 39.
95. James, Writings, 325.
96. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 40.
97. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 42.
98. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 90.
99. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 40.
100. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 49.
101. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 45.
102. See Hillman and Ventura, Psychotherapy.
103. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 58.
104. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 51.
105. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 68.
106. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, viii, 39.
107. Mahew 7:14.
108. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 123.
109. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 77.
110. Deleuze, Desert, 210.
111. Deleuze, Two, 98.
112. Gebser, Origin, 71.
113. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 84.
114. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 91.
115. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 139.
116. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 88.
117. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 170.
118. Jung, Archetypes, 103–4.
119. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 184.
120. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 152.
121. Deleuze, Desert, 156.
122. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 159.
123. Deleuze, Nietzsche, 21.
124. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 163.
125. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 161.
126. Nietzse, Daybreak, 130; Deleuze, Foucault, 86.
127. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 175.
128. Hillman, Re-Visioning, 159.
Chapter 13
e estion of Integration
Concluding with Isabelle Stengers

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195498-14

Two primary streams of thought, both inextricably philosophical and

psyological, are entwined in the pages above, initiated for the twentieth
century by the conceptual personae of James and Jung, both variously
influenced by the pre-twentieth century philosophers and, following
Stengers, both issuing into what may be designated a “psyo-philosophy.”1
e stream of thought initiated by James passes through Bergson and
Whitehead, and into Deleuze and Stengers, while the stream of thought
initiated by Jung issues into Deleuze and Hillman, both streams confluent
with numerous other streams. Stengers does not take up the Jungian lineage
from Deleuze, though her reclaiming of animism enables one of the primary
projects of this concluding apter: to bring the Jamesian-Bergsonian-
Whiteheadian stream for whi she is a primary heir into resonance with
the Jungian-Hillmanian stream, both of whi find twentieth-century
culminations in Deleuze, an integration whi may be imaginally figured in
the two evenings that Jung and James spent together in 1909.
Stengers possesses as strong a claim as anyone to being a primary heir to
the projects of both Whitehead and Deleuze, the laer of whom held her
work in high regard, telling the students at a 1987 lecture, with Stengers in
aendance: “Since Isabelle Stengers is here today, and won’t be here in the
coming weeks, I need to benefit from her presence.”2 We should also take
advantage of Stengers’ subtle presence in the project of constructing a novel
mode of thought. Stengers is comparable to Deleuze in complexity, her
writing unfolding over sinuous paragraphs, leading one ever deeper into the
misty labyrinths where the secrets of reality reside, not sharp and thrillingly
transgressive like Deleuze, but slow, careful, and world dissolvingly
profound. is concluding apter thinks primarily with the elements of
Stengers’ texts whi are not concerned with the specifics of science,
however tempting it is extensively to explicate the scientific ruminations
whi dominate the two-volume opus of 1997’s Cosmopolitics, rather
thinking with Stengers through 2002’s Thinking With Whitehead and
“Beyond Conversation,” 2005’s Capitalist Sorcery (with Phillipe Pignarre),
2008’s In Catastrophic Times, 2011’s “Reclaiming Animism,” and 2013’s
Another Science Is Possible.
One of Stengers’ great innovations is that Thinking With Whitehead is not
merely secondary literature, whi can certainly be extremely useful and
illuminating, but a primary contribution to the mode of thought we are
collectively constructing whi explicitly removes the author from the
center of the narrative. It forms a model, along with Deleuze’s books on
individual philosophers, that constructs the magnum opus not primarily as a
solitary heroic effort, though it inevitably retains this aracter to some
extent, but deemphasized in favor of a novel mode for whi the egoic
center of the philosophical narrative is no longer a totalitarian dictator,
however admired or loved, but a first among equals. is novel mode is a
Whiteheadian “slightest ange of tone” in whi the Deleuzean “dissolved
self” allows the others previously relegated to the unconscious baground
as subterranean influences or explicit interlocutors, including those who
read the text, to emerge in a more ambiguous light. It renders the writer
multiple, like Deleuze and Guaari who resisted aempts to aribute certain
parts of their co-wrien texts to the primary authorship of one or the other,
but under the designation of a single author who, like Plato or Hermes
Trismegistus, becomes an organizing nomination for a dynamic and
multivalent cast of aracters, a complex constellation of intertwining
potencies.3
 Mu of Cosmopolitics is devoted to problematizing the binary question
of whether the project of physics is to discover preexistent truths whi
reside in a transcendent domain, a grounding identity accessible to pure
reason whi James Clerk Maxwell mythically figured as e een of
Heaven, or merely socially to construct theories whi do not communicate
with any reality outside of language, mathematics, and the human mind, a
Whiteheadian “bifurcation of nature” whi he and Stengers diagnose as “a
disastrous philosophical fiction.”4 Stengers situates scientific practice in an
immanent “ecology of practices”5 beyond the simplistic duality of physics as
either discovering immutable laws of nature or projecting purely human
concerns onto a mute and unknowable cosmos. is constructivism discerns
the cocreative elicitation of different beings from oen discordant,
contradictory, incommensurable, and paradoxical multiplicities through the
“art of negotiating the in-between,” narrating the interstitial relations of
“genuine actors, interacting with one another in genuine intrigues.”6 e
existence of beings like particles, forces, or even the arrow of time can
neither be considered fully actualized prior to measurement and their
narrative constructions partially formulated in mathematics, nor merely
fictions created out of the imaginations of their discoverers, as entities
transcend their discoverers but do not authorize the assertion of a
transcendent domain, problematizing the very opposition between truth and
fiction. e ontological status of these beings is similarly ambiguous to
Freudian ildhood traumas, to aretypes, or to the gods of polytheism,
relational constructions whi constantly negotiate with the requirements
and obligations of a real virtuality that we bring into actuality through our
aempts to know it, a transversal “reciprocal capture” for whi “identities
that coinvent one another ea integrate a reference to the other for their
own benefit.”7 In fact, this physical narrativity is intimately intertwined with
“the question of integration”8 whi, involving and resonating with both
mathematics and metaphysics, has sustainedly struggled with the problem
of how the various theoretical, mathematical, and experimental constructs
that constitute physics can be brought together into increasingly expansive
and finely differentiated structures of integral coherence. is narrative is
also resonant with questions about the possibility of creating peace among
apparently incommensurable modes whi Stengers variously associates
with the cosmopolitical parliament, Deleuze’s designation of Spinozan ethics
as an ethology, Leibnizian Calculemus, Jamesian pragmatism, Whiteheadian
speculative empiricism, and philosophical peace fighters.
Stengers recognizes that no harmoniously unified theory will ever be able
to demonstrate both the reality of the neutrino in particle physics and the
spirits encountered in ethnopsyiatry in a way that is fully satisfying to the
requirements of either discipline because these entities and subjects are
extracted from more expansive topological domains that exceed their
specific constraints. Constraints are open questions whi can be satisfied in
different ways, various possible labyrinthine intrigues “compatible with that
same terrain,”9 not in a “utopian reconciliation,”10 but in the recognition that
all practices respond to limiting requirements and obligations. is
recognition allows the affirmation of the coexistence, and even resonance, of
these disparate beings in a risky cosmopolitical constructivism beyond the
oppositionality of exclusivist scientific rationalism, deeply embedded in
static institutions defined by pervasive bureaucratic professionalization,
whi oen inhibits novel creation despite the best intentions of those
employed by these institutions, and recognizing that novel modes of thought
require the creation of novel institutions for their collective efficacy.
Ironically, scientistic realism narratively defines itself by the polemical
judgment and disqualification – a Jamesian “refusal to consent to
understand,”11 a Whiteheadian “great refusal”12 – of other beings not subject
to scientific verification, and the modes required for their elicitation, as mere
mythical and imaginal fictions. And although the emist may judge the
alemist, the psyoanalyst disqualify the shaman, or the astronomer
ridicule the astrologer, the potencies encountered in alembic, ritual, or
horoscope nevertheless play just as integral a role in various cultures as the
neutrino does in the “cult”13 of modern cosmology. “One day,” Stengers
writes, “perhaps, we will experience a certain shame and great sadness at
having dismissed the age-old traditions”14 and the modes of knowledge and
activity they embody, whi can be conceived as complementary to
aracteristically modern modes.
“When astronomers make fun of astrologers,” Stengers observes in
Thinking With Whitehead, they a priori define the sky “as bere of any

other meaning”15 than the physical, subjecting astrology to the exclusive

authority of science without aempting to comprehend this practice, so
prevalent in nonmodern and non-Western cultures – and as diverse as
scientific practice itself – on its own terms, oen betraying a la of nuanced
understanding of what they deride. For instance, the vast majority of
astrology’s critics are unaware of contemporary conversations among
astrologers concerning the efficacy of the signs correlated with the
constellations, about whi some astrologers remain ambivalent given the
troubling issue of the precession of the equinoxes. Rather, these aretypal
cosmologists focus their efforts on the study of nonlocal and nonlinear
correlations between the angular relations of the planets, associated with the
gods of Hellenic polytheism in the Western tradition, and events in human
experience on both individual and collective scales, whi can be conceived
in the mode of a Deleuzean repetition of one dramatic situation of “another
at a different level.”16 Why should it be socially and professionally
acceptable facilely to denounce these correlations as a mere transmission of
local, causal influences, a naïve mode of construction whi no
philosophically sophisticated astrologer asserts, if “the electron does not let
itself be localized, any more than the cat whose Carrollian grin I can see”?17
How can one communicate the nuances of one’s mode of thought to an
interlocutor who refuses to listen, who “does not integrate within her own
reality the aspect of herself I am proposing,”18 but condescendingly and
preemptively dismisses what she reductively and erroneously assumes one
will say? “How can we affirm,” Stengers asks, both “the adventures of Kant
and those of a shaman?”19
Along with Whitehead, Stengers equally esews the resentful
denouncement of the modern epo whi has privileged rationality in a
mere reversal, so that rather than rejecting rationality, Whitehead “takes this
rationality to the limit, and therefore makes it ange its nature”20 into a
more expansive faculty, an intuitive speculative empiricism that exceeds
solitary rationality. Stengers positions both the nonmodern practices of
astrology, alemy, or shamanism and the modern practices of science,
tenology, or economics as necessarily privileged in their appropriate
epos, though the epos defined by these successive privilegings are of
limited duration, so that the denouncement of superstition was necessary for
the liberation of thought in the eighteenth century, but became inhibiting to
heterodox speculation in the nineteenth century.21 And these successive
epos will inevitably be subsumed in a novel epo not primarily by appeal
to the judgment of logical proof and polemical refutation, but to
“imagination, the only eventual producer of a transformation in habits,”22
Stengers dreaming with Whitehead of both modern and nonmodern actors
being reciprocally transformed by this subsumption. When Stengers
describes the actors of physics engaging in a dramatizing whi is
“inseparable from the role they play”23 in their milieu, she might as well be
evoking the Deleuzean gods with their roles, whose multiplicity of relations
itself forms the stage on whi the action occurs. Both the system of physics
and the system of the gods are well-founded fictions, narrative constructions
whi answer to their own partial requirements and obligations while
ignoring or deemphasizing others. e task for a novel epo may circulate
around the question of how to aieve integral generalizations whi take
account of the different potentialities and constraints of the most expansive
possible field of relations, encompassing both gods and particles, as well as
the entities aracteristic of other systems answering to other dynamisms
and demands.
Like the nonmodern others of animism or astrology – in a conception of
“living person”24 whi Stengers declines, in a Whiteheadian mode, to
associate exclusively with humans – the neutrino is an “ensemble
representation”25 whi is “susceptible only to interactions that occur very
rarely.”26 All of these entities require esoteric knowledge and patient
aentiveness within carefully constructed conditions for their elicitation,
whether the particle accelerator or the shamanic ceremony, though both
phantom particles and phantasmic ancestors demand thought and action
within their respective domains when they are encountered. Science does
not require a disqualification of the other for its efficacy, but only for claims
to exclusive truth, and thus cosmopolitics “integrates, problematically, the
question of an ecology of practices,”27 constructing, through novel language,
the possibility of peace among the various values that define modernity by
their inclusion or exclusion in an unknown elsewhere whose loss we may
mourn, but whi “we must pass over in silence.”28 is problematic
integration is a discordant accord beyond mere silent tolerance between
science and its nonmodern others, whether ancestor spirits, djinns, or gods.
With extreme care and subtlety, Stengers makes visible how the putatively
autonomous beings elicited by the tenological devices and mathematical
formulations of physics can only find proof through their contextual efficacy
within communities of practice. She demonstrates, with great sympathy for
scientific endeavors, that faith in the ultimate intelligibility of the universe
beyond the paradoxes and irrationalities that still bedevil the frontiers of
physics, a faith initiated by Galileo whi asserts its authority to judge and
denounce “the teeming multiplicity of ways of knowing”29 beyond science as
merely irrational, is no more rationally grounded than a belief in spirits or
gods. ese beliefs, whether in pure reason or agential others, pragmatically
produce their own limited domains of verification from a more expansive
virtual domain always exceeding their actual elicitation, so that belief and
reason form an opposition extracted from a plural and integral univocity, a
generative problem for one phase of process whi can be reframed in a
novel phase as a nonhierarical contrast revealing deeper questions.
In Thinking With Whitehead, Stengers recognizes that Whitehead’s
conception of God is distinctly secular and immanent, closer to the Greek
Eros than to a Christian divinity,30 a conception partially derived from
Spinozan pantheism, variously resonant with the Leibnizian, Bergsonian,
and Deleuzean conceptions of divinity, and neutral in the opposition
between aos and cosmos, a aosmic conception for whi the “solitary
consciousness”31 inseparable from despotic monotheism may begin to open
to interstitial novelty. And is it not precisely the Deleuzean-Nietzsean
gods who “have died from laughing” that abide, as virtual potencies
demanding ingression, in the interstices of the fracturing of monotheistic
solitude? is fracturing intimated by Stengers may perhaps serve to open
Whitehead’s thought from the monotheism with whi he primarily dwells
to polytheism, whi he does not generally evoke, but with whi his
pluralist constructivism resonates, a conception of potencies whi Stengers
carries forward by reclaiming animism, the multiplicitous dancing fairies as
complement to the singular Crucified.32 Stengers differentiates Whitehead’s
monotheistic conception, whi was perhaps more efficacious in the context
and culture within whi he was writing,33 from James’ given that
Whitehead envisioned himself as James’ heir, though this conception is also
distinctly pragmatic and constructivist, so that “God is that thanks to whi
ea act of creation can integrate” the local “evils” of destructive discordance
in more expansively differentiated contrasts.34 She even deploys, at a crucial
moment in the final apter – whi discusses how Whitehead’s conception
of God transforms the divine personality into a problematic question luring
ingression – a passage from Deleuze that veritably shouts his penant for
polytheism: “is decisional power at the heart of problems, this creation,
this launing that makes us members of the race of the gods, is nevertheless
not ours. e gods themselves are subject to the laws of Ananke.”35 However,
Stengers does not turn down this path toward the multiplicity of divine
persons in this text, does not even comment upon their appearance, leaving
the gods and their problematic destinies there for us plainly to see but
almost pointedly ignoring them, turning from Whitehead’s appropriation of
the imagery of monotheism not toward the gods, but to animism, mostly
esewing the admiedly patriaral Hellenic pantheon for the animistic
mode whose practice in recent centuries has perhaps been dominated by
women: witcra.36
is is a decisive moment in Stengers’ text, as the passage she employs
from Deleuze brings her up to the precipice beyond where the gods must be
affirmed, though she does not take this particular leap whi Deleuze
undertook, however enigmatically, at least not in this text. e reasons for
this decision are perhaps unknowable from reading her work. Does she
esew the path of polytheism at this juncture because she does not find it
efficacious, tracing a progressive turning ba from exclusivist oppositional
modern rationality to animism through an intervening monotheism without
extensively tarrying with polytheism because it simply does not appeal to
her temperament? Or is this conspicuous absence of the gods a strategic
oice motivated by the sense that an affirmation of these potencies might
be a bridge too far, a crossing of the Rubicon that would risk disqualifying
her careful, patient work from being heard and embraced by theorists who
still adhere to unexamined prejudices or, perhaps more importantly, who
obey certain lingering prohibitions, whatever their personal beliefs, despite
oen dubious claims to an ultimate criticality toward their own positions as
well as their cultural milieus? Or does she simply not take this step because
her book thinks with Whitehead, and Whitehead does not take this step?
Perhaps it is even possible that Stengers has deliberately set up the pieces of
this puzzle to be assembled by her readers, the clues to be deciphered,
making possible this further step without finding it necessary to take it
herself, a supposition supported by the moments in her texts when she
anowledges, always in passing, at least until 2008, the efficacy of the gods
as mu as the beings of physics or the spirits of animism.
Stengers almost asks to be appropriated and employed in novel areas,
recognizing that a philosopher’s heirs, “occupied with their own business,
will dispose as they see fit of what you propose to them.” We may thus feel
encouraged to risk carrying her thought into a different domain, that of
polytheism, especially given her profound debt to Deleuze, calling upon her
“humorous double,”37 constructed in relation to the requirements and
obligations of her texts, whi allows both the positive affirmation of the
philosopher’s identity, as well as the denial required for this affirmation,
serving as its negative space, to return in the eternal return, to be saved by
Whitehead’s impersonal, mathematical God. Because we have already come
so far, in these pages, in discerning the gods of a mythical dialectic, I am
risking bringing this polytheistic consciousness into relation with the
concepts expressed by Stengers, who oen evokes most of the theorists
above. Her thought is deeply resonant with the polytheistic mode that she
almost studiously avoids, especially in her earlier texts, but whi
unmistakably glimmers just at the horizons of her writing, not only in her
discussions of animism, but in her recognition of the actors who respond to
scientific inquiry, the liminal entities of physics and the biological organisms
whose study is inseparable from their celebration.
In fact, beginning in 2005 with Capitalist Sorcery, and continuing in 2008
with In Catastrophic Times and 2013 with Another Science Is Possible,
Stengers began to enact a somewhat different emphasis in her work, a slight
tonal shi, not only in her turn from engaging primarily with the history of
philosophy and scientific invention to questions of capitalism, climate
ange, and genetically modified organisms, but, finally, in calling upon the
figures of Hermes and Gaia in addition to her evocations of witcra,
sorcery, and animism. Stengers figures climate ange as “the intrusion of
Gaia”38 to whi we must respond, and she explicitly esews associating
this catastrophe with “Ouranos or Chronos,” Gaia’s “terrible ildren,”39 as it
is specifically Gaia’s blind and fearsome indifference we have offended, so
she is the goddess who must be remembered.40
A primary excluded other in the history of philosophy is the Sophist, a
figure to whom Stengers returns in a number of texts, who, along with poets
and magicians, serves to problematize the image of thought as the pure
pursuit of truth figured as an escape from the cave of immanence.41 e
Sophist is an irrepressible figure whi both Derrida and Deleuze partially
express in very different ways, making endless trouble and anxiety for those
who would unambiguously assert transcendent, objective truth beyond our
immanent constructions, embodying the pharmakon, the drug whi can
have opposite effects at different doses, healing or destroying in the guise of
“savior or sorcerer,”42 though healing is oen inextricably entwined with
destruction. However, although both Derrida and Deleuze are oriented
toward overcoming the past, Stengers views the creation of novel concepts
aracteristic of both Deleuze and Whitehead as leading beyond the binary
opposition of an absolute authority of transcendent laws and their “critical
deconstruction.”43 Stengers’ “imagination and hope come up against their
limits”44 with Derrida, for whom, she implies, we are “ ‘imprisoned’ in the
network of our symbols and our meanings,”45 enacting that “old traumatic
truth” whi crushes the “hope to get outside,”46 though she also
anowledges that the binary of deconstructive and constructive
postmodernism itself is a construction peculiar to the American reading of
primarily Fren texts not as prevalent in Europe.47 Certain elements of
Deleuze’s work have a strong affinity with deconstruction, particularly his
critiques of Hegel and of the Oedipal, in whi he and Guaari explicitly
refer to Derrida, so that the Fren tradition whi tends to exalt enigma
and obscurity is generally more suspicious than the Anglophone philosophy
derived from James and Whitehead of any kind of totalizing unification. In
contrast, “Whitehead does not deconstruct anything,” but rather understands
“that oppositions are never final, that producing the possibility of enjoying
new contrasts where oppositions once ruled is the adventure of both hope
and reason.”48 e somewhat darker and more dramatic palee of Deleuze’s
constructivist thought, largely derived from Nietzse, provides a figure of
integration, beyond even the “middle ground”49 Stengers produces between
Whitehead and Deleuze, for the almost purely negative project of Derridean
deconstruction and the almost purely positive “radical constructivism”50 of
Whitehead, whi “takes every construction to its cosmological power,”51
though like Bergson, Deleuze certainly leans in this constructive direction
with his multivalent conceptions of dynamic potentialities, and of
philosophy as the creation of concepts.52
However, Deleuze sometimes engages in “the heroic mode of radical risk
and extreme solitude”53 that may be recognized in a Hillmanian vein as the
ego resisting its initiatory dissolution and death even in the affirmation of
pain and madness, an aitude of refusal modeled on those aspects of
Nietzse whi may be deemphasized in an integral mode consonant with
Whitehead’s less contentious presence. is deemphasis of the ego is
copiously affirmed by Deleuze, though inconsistently, as he oen enacts this
heroic refusal, so that the tension between the valorization of solitary genius
transgressing orthodoxy and the dissolution of egoic solitude in
multiplicities and assemblages can be understood as a primary polarity in
whi Deleuze’s individual struggle enabled some of his greatest conceptual
creations. Deleuze could perhaps benefit from some of Whitehead’s calm
maturity in relation to his denouncements of Hegel, the beautiful soul, and
the Oedipal, the Whiteheadian aitude whi “deliberately ignores hatred
and anguish”54 in the serene trust that discordant conflicts are opportunities
for harmonious integrations built from contrast. And Whitehead could
reciprocally benefit from a dose of Deleuze’s dramatic Dionysian madness,
the generative aos of the dissolved self that allowed him to see through
the fractured I to the interstitial domain of the gods, while Whiteheadian
consciousness, however mu it dissolves the world at its deepest
foundations, also tends to leave the monocentric ego of the philosopher
unproblematically intact, a unified, dispassionate, and oen amused
observer of the ultimately complex mathematical relations of process.
Whereas Whitehead tends to leave the psye unexamined, we might come
to recognize with Stengers that “one is oneself the invention of the world on
whi one depends,”55 self and world intimately entwined.
Of course, neither philosopher could have been any different, and I would
not want them to ange a word, though perhaps the still-living modes of
thought they transmit to their readers can find a differentiating integration
within the work of those who love both. Whitehead’s wry detament
“cancels any dramaturgy of thought,”56 a wise humor whi is a large part of
his appeal, though Whitehead could also benefit from being brought into
closer relation with the Deleuzean method of dramatization, with
Hillmanian personifying, and with Jungian psyodramatics, “adding a new
dimension to the cosmos,”57 one of color, personality, and dynamism, to
Whitehead’s vast, placid, and subtly shaded mathematical-cosmological
constructions. As Stengers understands, along with both Whitehead and
Deleuze, “it is the business of thought, as appealing to the future, to be
dangerous,”58 though this danger need not necessarily be undertaken in
heroic solitude. Along with numerous other theorists who are constructing a
Jungian turn in Deleuze studies, or a Deleuzean turn in Jungian studies,
oen in explicit resonance with Whitehead, I am risking the further danger
of introducing the Jungian lineage into this meeting between Deleuzeans
and Whiteheadians staged by Stengers. is introduction is justified not only
by Jung’s influence on Deleuze, but by the numerous points of relation that
have been explored somewhat more extensively, at least in certain sectors,
between Jung and Whitehead, an aempt at integration constituted in both
the extraordinary resonance and the differentiated contrast of these
theorists.59
Stengers discusses Simondon’s concept of individuation from his 1964
magnum opus, a concept whi is at least partially derived from Jung,
nominating the individual’s becoming in relation to the “primordial
heterogeneity”60 of their internal and external milieus. Deleuze writes that,
although “modern philosophy has been wary of adopting the problem” of
the principle of individuation, Simondon provides “a profoundly original
theory of individuation implying a whole philosophy,” whi Deleuze deems
“extremely important.”61 And, as Simondon writes in his book’s final words:

Jung discovers, in the aspiration of the alemists, the translation of the

operation of individuation, and of all the forms of sacrifice, whi
suppose a return to a state comparable to that of birth, that is to return
to a state rily potentiated, not yet determined, a domain for the new
propagation of life.

By generalizing and elaborating this conception, Simondon suggests, “we

can set out to found the axiomatic of a human science on a new theory of
form.”62 e numerous clues aesting to Jung’s influence on Deleuze, and
thus on mu subsequent continental philosophy, have oen been ignored.
However, differentiating integration, conceptualized as the alemical death
and rebirth enacting a dialectical return to formal potencies in novel
registers, and embodied in Simondon’s “study of the genesis of crystals as a
process of individuation”63 exemplifying the paradoxical, problematic field
that “exists within an aretype,”64 is at least partially derived from Jung,
who writes that “again and again I encounter the mistaken notion that an
aretype is determined in regard to its content,” suggesting rather that
aretypes are comparable “to the axial system of a crystal.”65 And as
Stengers writes, “the beauty of the perfect crystal relies on its ability to
effect a harmonious convergence of two rivals,”66 resonant with Jung’s
conception of individuation as the integration of conflicting opposites, whi
Simondon describes as a speculative transduction creating an image of
thought beyond the pervasive duality of maer and form derived from
Aristotle, not as a mere unification, but as a resonant contrast between
disparate domains, an ecological convergence in a problematic field whi
also affirms divergence.
Referring especially to Leibniz and Bergson in addition to Whitehead and
Deleuze, Stengers observes that “the question of finality,”67 like that of
integration, has become a primary site of contention for modern philosophy
and science, though it is only beyond this polemical baleground, where
materialism seeks reductively and rhetorically to disqualify vitalism, that
scientists studying emergent self-organization in biology, nonequilibrium
physics, and neoconnectionist networks have been able to pursue more
profound and complex questions. us, the evolutionary biologist Stephen
Jay Gould can affirm “an understanding of evolution as integration,”68
exceeding what Stengers designates as a “‘holy war’ against final causes” by
a reductionist Darwinism “in whi physical causality reigns supreme,”69
demanding the submission of aracteristically nonmodern causalities
disqualified as other. However, resonant with most of the theorists above,
Stengers recognizes that the teleology affirmed by Whitehead is not a mere
“cosmic harmonization,”70 but the satisfaction of local integrations whi
respect irresolvable differences, expressions of a “divine lure” transforming
mere disjunctions into contrasts constituting a complex, dynamic, and open
totality emerging from nonlocal and nonlinear correlations of eternal objects
in the guise of problematic questions. ese subtle formal-final causes are
resonant with Spinozan substance and its heterogenous modes of expression
in a fully “correlated universe” envisaged as composed of vast and
intertwined relational networks of labyrinthine prehensions, both positive
and negative, across scales and orders of ingression in “a reciprocal
immanence that entangles harmonies and dissonances, convergences and
divergences,”71 potentialities luring becoming toward an infinitely displaced
problematic horizon defining the finite limits of concrete actuality.
Stengers affirms “the possibility of peace”72 embodied in this cosmic
entanglement, whi Whitehead approaes as a mathematician, Stengers
calling upon Leibniz’s slogan, Calculemus – “Let us calculate” – not in a
totalizing global sema that reduces conceptual difference to the
quantitative ratios of logical rationality with their measurement,
comparison, and summation, whi constitute trivial solutions in the
mathematical sense, but in speculative local solutions to qualitative
problems exceeding the solely mathematical domain. ese solutions are
enacted in the transformations of matrices from whi an always
provisional and partial global integration emerges in a “cosmopolitical
parliament,”73 a mode that creatively negotiates coherence between the
conflicting or disjointed demands of disparate entities, but whi always
resists closure, as it does not need to denounce or deny what is outside the
domain of what must be taken into account for any particular problem.
Rather, it discerns that the way the question is posed may be more
important than the answer to whi it inexorably leads, the problem seing
the scene in whi the relational drama plays itself out, constructing the
ensemble of actors and roles beyond mere incommensurability, creating
from “radical heterogeneity”74 a more profoundly resonant field of relational
potencies opening into more expansive domains of liberated expression.
In Capitalist Sorcery, Stengers and Pignarre invoke Hermes – the
mercurial trister evoked by Hillman as the impure intermediary between
Apollo and Dionysus – as the god presiding over Calculemus and the
pragmatic trust in the possibility of a diplomatically negotiated peace.75
76
Calculemus is not a “predetermined calculus” whi subtractively purifies
through the bifurcating resolution of binary determinations, conflating truth
with the social power to judge and disqualify mere falsity, but a dissolution
of disjunction in a more profound game. It is the additive construction of a
more complex integrating third for whi the question of the ultimate
reality of neutrinos or gods becomes less important than the creative
possibilities of the world they can inhabit together by bringing their
requirements and obligations into sustained respectful relation as questions
to be explored rather than summarily answered, creating an ensemble cast
from disparate actors who did not previously recognize one another’s
existence beyond the mere logic of exange. e only requirement of the
mode of thought figured as Calculemus and the cosmopolitical parliament is
the affirmation that peace is possible, though peace does not preexist this
activity waiting to be discovered in an objective transcendent realm. e
entities this mode takes into account are “compatible for integration,” as
Whitehead writes, not in a final closure, but in a continually renegotiated
convergence serving as a lure for novel creations. Integration constructs not
only the problematic entities, but the self who is operating the peace-
fabricating function, a function whi Stengers offers as a shi of emphasis
away from “the Fren inclination for despising the very idea of ‘saving’
anything from conflict,”77 a ange of tone to whi Deleuze, along with
Bergson, Baelard, and Simondon, all of whom profess affinities with Jung,
is more amenable than Derrida, though Derrida makes this shi possible in
his wake.
Stengers recognizes that Western philosophy polemically constructs
“conflict as the very mark of truth,” the distribution of truth and falsity
imagined as the result of a bale between rival claimants, a pervasive
oppositional mode whi she calls upon the figure of Hermetic peace
fighters to overcome. Paradoxically, these figures do not “enter into
conflict”78 with conflict itself, but form an always-precarious alliance, more
profound than a monotonously totalizing unity or a mere compromise, to
lure the pied combatants beyond the interminable static conflict, seducing
them outside the center of gravity where exclusive aention is given to
dominating the other through rationalized disqualification, destabilizing the
opposition by opening it onto a broader stage formed from a multiplicity of
relations among actors, whi removes the arge from the binary relation.
Peace fighters transform the conflict “into an ingredient of the problem,”79
allowing directed aention to begin to circulate beyond the closed circuit in
a more expansive mainic assemblage informed by flows issuing into other
dimensions of experience. e harsh spotlight of the ring where the combat
occurs, with the area outside this central nucleus fading into darkness, is
reenvisaged in a more diffuse light emanating from complex laices of rays
constituted in intricate and contrasting paerns of illumination and shadow.
e combatant whose fierce ire was focused squarely on the opponent now
widens their field of aention to cat the web of glances from the
encircling assemblage, the gaze of a lover whi elicits a swelling of desire,
the steady, distant stare of a father communicating a complex mixture of
approval and judgment, a whole dreaming drama waiting to be enacted
once the fixed conflict is abandoned for a deeper kind of fight in the
interstices of a totalizing power whi reduces everything to oppositional
hierary.
is martial pharmakon destroys the comforting egoic unity defined
against an other by means of subtle infection, but it also serves as an
antidote to the poisonous Apollonian-Kronian possession, enacting a
Dionysian transformation, a Promethean breaking through the wall, though
oen wearing the Jamesian and Whiteheadian masks of a wry practicality in
the performance of trust beyond the mere telegraphing of confidence,
resonant with Hillman’s mercurial roguishness. is disguised mythical
dialectic dramatizes an asymmetrical and eccentric slipping through the
cras sideways beyond an exclusively oppositional drama figured as the
war of good and evil, the bale of the sexes, the defeat of nonmodern
superstition by the modern, enacting a dissolution of conflict in a more
expansive domain of affective and conceptual contrast. And Stengers also
discerns this transformative experimentation with words in both Spinozan
and Bergsonian intuition, for whi “ea new contrast, as it is added, will
be integrated into harmony in the form of what it has made possible,”80
evoking integration as a more profound and heterogenous dramatization, a
celebration of contrasting coexistence rather than a totalizing unification.
Stengers associates Whiteheadian speculative empiricism with the
Leibnizian metaphysical correlate of the calculus, Spinozan and Bergsonian
intuition, Jamesian pragmatism, and Deleuzean repetition exceeding a
shaering Nietzsean “hammer-thought,”81 the designation he “reserved for
his hypothesis of the eternal return,”82 an inflection of the eternal return that
relinquishes the need for denouncement. While Nietzse never fully
expressed the eternal return in its positive form, but primarily created space
for it by the destruction of what it would supplant, Stengers designates
speculative empiricism, resonant with a Deleuzean transcendental
empiricism of the eternal return in the form of a mythical dialectic, and with
Jungian-Hillmanian aretypal thought, as a mode whi “makes things
hold together,”83 not in a totalitarian unification, but in a multiplicity of
integrated contrasts. Speculative philosophers experiment with language to
construct, and thus to discover, novel conceptual integrations that reinvent
the tradition in whi their thought is situated, leading to deeper questions
eliciting more profound contrasts in metaphysical “dimensions of
experience”84 beyond the current doxa, obscure interstitial domains for
whi clear and stable language remains to be created. Stengers elaborates
Whitehead’s image of a mountain climber who can climb the ontological
cliff in various ways, but who requires a “foothold,”85 a topological feature
from whi to construct a path by particular modes of aention, a vertical
figure reminiscent of Bergson’s riverine landscape, whether that mode is
oriented toward physical or metaphysical practices. ese are all legitimate
modes of construction as long as they can find pragmatic footholds for their
efficacy in a radical empiricism for whi no domain of aention is
privileged, with ea practice initially a heterodox and “extravagant ideal”86
rendered integral parts of their cultures through the creation of habits and
institutions, until they become new orthodoxies that must be renewed and
transformed through novel lines of flight aending to, and speculatively
affirming, new dimensions of experience in new ways.
ese speculative flights must inevitably go beyond the creations of
Whitehead, Jung, Deleuze, and even Stengers, so that thinking with these
theorists means carrying their verbal concepts into novel domains.
Integration performs an infinite fractal regress of footnotes within footnotes
in whi the conceptual aracters of Stengers, Whitehead, James, and
Bergson may undergo novel encounters with the gods in our narrative, Jung
may be allenged by the Deleuzean obscurity whi unseles and deepens
holistic modes of thought, and Deleuze may be persuaded to shi his focus
away from heroic denouncements to an affirmation of the value of
wholeness,87 though always avoiding totalizing unification through
differentiated contrast in both the Leibnizian-Whiteheadian mathematical
mode and in the Sellingian-Jungian-Hillmanian mythical mode. ese are
all actors playing starring roles in a drama whi exceeds them, the
dramatic construction of a novel epo. And while this integration requires
a careful aentiveness to the subtle nuances of ea theorist’s language, it
also requires the humor of “cavalier creation,”88 the laughter of the gods in
the face of death. Creation on a novel plane of immanence can only occur in
consonance with the passing away of an older mode of relation whi
seemed to constitute reality itself, but whose exclusions and incoherencies
have come to be felt as intolerable. e suffering and dissolution of
transformation demanded by critical events beyond our control increasingly
renders the earlier epo as a strange dream, a dream whi some of us may
vividly recall, but whi our ildren or grandildren may only know
through the narratives we recount. And thus, we enter inexorably into a
novel epo, whi is like nothing we could have imagined, whi is
constituted in novel problems and questions, novel milieus for our creative
constructions.
Stengers can be imagined as speaking for all of the theorists above when
she writes that language “is itself the operator of anges of epo, on every
scale,”89 and an ultimate project of these complexly intertwining streams of
thought is “the construction of a new story”90 with its disparate inflections.
Integration constructs a narrative about integral constructivism whose
recounting expressively amplifies potencies capable of summoning a novel
epo beyond the modern and its hierarical binary disqualifications,
whi extends an open invitation to those who continue to insist on
denouncing. is narrative constructs the capacity to create the conditions
for its own validity by the invention of peculiar syntax serving to invoke
and express, through increasingly subtle relational formulations, the
dynamisms just past a horizon of discernibility, enacting not an escape from
the cave, but a lucid dreaming in the labyrinth, as “only stories are capable
of giving meaning to the way in whi what seemed separated ceases to be
so,”91 whether the story begins with “Once upon a time,” “In the beginning,”
or “Let AX be the axis.”92
To compose a novel narrative that can begin to think the unthinkable and
discern the indiscernible by creating commensurability among the
incommensurable, one must think slowly, carefully, deeply, but also, like the
“impertinent ild”93 who announces what everyone knows – that the
emperor is naked – one must be willing to risk, at efficacious moments,
acting the role of this ild who dares to uer what the dominant powers
insist must remain silent. But one must also find efficacious ways to modify
the dream of the other, an activity for whi Stengers unexpectedly employs
the term “politeness,”94 not in the civility hypocritically demanded by the
American right as a means for suppressing the legitimate and necessary
anger and despair voiced through politics and protest, but in an approa
whi recognizes that the only way to modify the other’s dream without
doing violence to it is to recognize the other’s agency, however alien, and to
speak in ways that allow the other, whether human or nonhuman, to hear
what is being suggested beyond the demand for conflict. Dream
modification requires an encounter of vectors generating local resonances
whi reciprocally transform the parties to the conversation, not through the
typical subjection to another’s dream, but through the collaborative creation
of a narrative in whi all participants have a voice in defining their role.
If we listen to what the aracters in the pages above have been telling us
in their peculiar dialects, the foreign languages they have carved out within
their culture’s predominant language,95 this novel epo-constructing
narrative may consist, above all, in the overcoming of the dominance of
oppositional problematics opening into the mysterious depths of paradox
leading beyond our current horizons of conception to events whi allow a
new cosmos to emerge from the interstices of our collective reality. is
emergence is a subtle ange of tone whi nevertheless makes a radical
difference in our shared experience, a transition beyond the opposition of
continuity and discontinuity whi transforms all domains of human
endeavor through a gradual subterranean modification in whi it suddenly
becomes normal for the predominant mode of thought “to accept what it
was proud of rejecting,”96 those other modes that have served to define the
modern by their disqualification and occultation. e novel potentialities
and contrasts whi this narrative elicits may reveal a deeper kind of
enantment than that through whose rejection modernity has defined itself,
whi can be discerned, if we allow the textual spell to work on us, between
the insistent, and occasionally surprising, lines of strangely resonant and
potent talismanic signs composing the invocation of novel worlds. Although
language can imprison both reader and writer in a closed discursive
circulation, it can also free our imaginations by bewiting us, tempting us
to leap into novel domains.
Like Galileo whose founding scientific act is the ild-like rolling of balls
down a ramp, like the Catholic who participates in divinity by consuming a
dry wafer, Stengers evokes James’ “speculative leap”97 into the unknown
beyond the containment of exclusionary oppositional logic, trusting that a
solid foothold will be encountered on the other side. Stengers thinks with
James and Whitehead beyond this image of a grounding on whi to land by
means of the image of a circle of dancers, ea embodying some element of
an emergent mode, ea contributing an essential aspect to that mode’s
coherence, always circulating, never fixed, nothing at the circle’s center of
gravity but an intertwining mesh of flashing gazes, a fundamental
relationality whi requires mutual trust for the circle not to fall apart. In
fact, the coherence of any mode of thought requires that ea foundational
proposition leans on the other moving propositions, and there is no central,
immobile, privileged proposition whi can guarantee the stability of the
ensemble, despite the totalizing aempts of logocentrism. Any mode of
thought is constituted in an inescapable risk whose value is encountered in
its pragmatic efficacy, not its exclusive validity grounded in a transcendent
or immanent reality, whether God, maer, or the absolute. is imaginal
circle of dancers suggests the revolutions of the gods in the eternal return,
the Platonic circulations associated with the planets passing through the
centuries into the disparate conceptions of Selling, Nietzse, Jung,
Deleuze, and Hillman, ea divine potency revolving in complex
relationalities at an always-receding horizon, luring us toward destined
becomings.
Beyond the image of the dancers, Stengers evokes the Bergsonian
swimmer, this time as a deep-sea diver, the speculative thinker descending
into the heterogenous depths below the surface doxa, the Dionysian domain
of madness and transformation, the Poseidonian dissolution of fixed
categories and identities. at whi distinguishes mere destructive madness
and dissipation from a creative, inspired madness and intoxication is the
possession of the necessary conceptual equipment, the forms of language
and modes of thought required to transmute the imaginal demonic potencies
of the depths into novel conceptual creations, new resonances between
words and experiences generating an emergence from the underworld or the
abyss into novel domains of thought and affect.98 And although Stengers
observes that mere “irresponsibility, as an ultimate metaphysical generality,
would be, as Whitehead reproaed Leibniz, inadequate,”99 resting on a
facile optimization, Spinoza, followed by Jung, Deleuze, and Hillman, can
allow us to integrate Whiteheadian responsibility with a Nietzsean
irresponsibility, Stengers recognizing Whitehead’s conception of God as
resonant with amor fati, the affirmation of felt destiny. We are not
responsible for the will, the affects and inclinations figured as demons and
angelic emissaries encountered in the depths, who derisively mo or
placidly ignore our efforts to control them, though we are responsible for
how we oose to express those potent affects and inclinations through a
freedom of mind whi can creatively equip itself for the descent and its
encounters, or dive without discipline or preparation into mere madness,
into destructive psyoses of all kinds. And yet adventure is inextricable
from real danger, from the apocalyptic hauntings whi render the treasure
as hard to aain, and thus destructive madness can also be thrust upon us
despite our best intentions and our most valiant efforts, but then madness
can also li like a veil.
When these theorists evoke the gods or ancestors, it is not in the mode of
a return to the lost innocence of romantic enantment, but as mature and
responsible tenicians constructing provisional practices to encounter the
potencies whi force us to think beyond our current obligations and
encodings, a higher responsibility beyond the static responsibility of laws,
contracts, institutions, and norms in whi we are embedded, whi we
must interpret and obey, beyond the duality of responsibility and
irresponsibility itself.100 ese ambiguous others always exceed any actual
expression, overflowing any possibility of rational containment, demanding
the creation of novel forms of life. Encounters with cosmic forces oen take
the form of madness and pathology, so that within every problematic
symptom is a god who demands to be heard, though these potencies are not
always benevolent, but neutral in regard to their ingression, demanding only
the creation of novelty with no thought for our joy or suffering. e gods
require another ethics in addition to right action and adherence to law,
beyond tolerance and forgiveness, an ethology for whi the primary oice
is whether one fulfills or refuses one’s destiny, or rather, at whi order one
enacts the complex affective and imaginally intuited potencies that
constitute one’s becoming, expressing a monadic soul composed of multiple
entangled epos infinitesimally lured toward an always-receding
transcendental horizon in the intensive interstices whi constitute the
future, a dangerous and extravagantly potentiated future coexistent with the
distant past where the gods dream.
Notes
1. Stengers, Thinking, 186.
2. Deleuze, “Whitehead”; Stengers, Thinking, 120.
3. Stengers, Thinking, 242, 499.
4. Stengers, Thinking, 106.
5. Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, vii.
6. Stengers, Thinking, 172.
7. Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, 35–6.
8. Stengers, Thinking, 165–6.
9. Stengers, Thinking, 69.
10. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 269.
11. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 46.
12. Stengers, Thinking, 219.
13. Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, 19.
14. Stengers, Catastrophic, 149.
15. Stengers, Thinking, 95.
16. Deleuze, Difference, 83.
17. Stengers, Thinking, 102.
18. Stengers, Thinking, 159.
19. Stengers, Thinking, 508.
20. Stengers, Thinking, 263.
21. Stengers, Thinking, 137, 514.
22. Stengers, Thinking, 143.
23. Stengers, Thinking, 375.
24. Stengers, Thinking, 326.
25. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 201.
26. Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, 21.
27. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 356.
28. Wigenstein, Tractatus, 89.
29. Stengers, Thinking, 47.
30. Stengers, Thinking, 488.
31. Stengers, Thinking, 483–44.
32. Stengers, Thinking, 511.
33. Stengers, Thinking, 134–5.
34. Stengers, Thinking, 286.
35. Stengers, Thinking, 489; Deleuze, Difference, 199.
36. Stengers, Another, 131; Stengers, “Enigmatic,” 163.
37. Stengers, Thinking, 489–90.
38. Stengers, Catastrophic, 42.
39. Stengers, Catastrophic, 44.
40. Stengers, Catastrophic, 47, 58; Stengers, Another, 133.
41. Stengers, “Beyond,” 246.
42. Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, 29.
43. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 197.
44. Stengers, “Beyond,” 237.
45. Stengers, Thinking, 404.
46. Stengers, “Beyond,” 245; Stengers, “Wondering,” 377; Stengers,
“Enigmatic,” 155.
47. Stengers, “Beyond,” 235.
48. Stengers, “Beyond,” 236.
49. Stengers, “Beyond,” 238.
50. Stengers, “Beyond,” 237–8.
51. Stengers, Thinking, 512.
52. Stengers, “Beyond,” 238.
53. Stengers, Thinking, 272.
54. Stengers, Thinking, 160.
55. Stengers, Thinking, 180.
56. Stengers, Thinking, 258.
57. Stengers, Thinking, 513.
58. Stengers, “Beyond,” 239.
59. See Griffin, Archetypal; Stengers, “Beyond,” 236.
60. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 292.
61. Deleuze, Desert, 86, 89.
62. Simondon, Individuation, 697 (slightly modified translation).
63. Simondon, Individuation, 6.
64. Simondon, Individuation, 696.
65. Jung, Archetypes, 79.
66. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 293.
67. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 210–11.
68. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 296.
69. Stengers, Thinking, 126.
70. Stengers, Thinking, 311.
71. Stengers, Thinking, 388.
72. Stengers, “Beyond,” 243.
73. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 399.
74. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 401.
75. Stengers, Sorcery, 118.
76. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 411.
77. Stengers, “Beyond,” 243.
78. Stengers, “Beyond,” 244, 246.
79. Stengers, Thinking, 15.
80. Stengers, Thinking, 476.
81. Stengers, Thinking, 501.
82. Stengers, Thinking, 315.
83. Stengers, Thinking, 292–3.
84. Stengers, Thinking, 248.
85. Stengers, Thinking, 67.
86. Stengers, Thinking, 115.
87. See Deleuze, Cinema 1, 10.
88. Stengers, Thinking, 292.
89. Stengers, Thinking, 417.
90. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 223; Stengers, “Wondering,” 371.
91. Stengers, Thinking, 332–3.
92. e first words of Leibniz’s first paper on the calculus, “A New
Method.” Stengers, Thinking, 350.
93. Stengers, Thinking, 182.
94. Stengers, Thinking, 517.
 95. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 4–5.
96. Stengers, Thinking, 335.
97. Stengers, Thinking, 235; Stengers, “Enigmatic,” 166.
98. Stengers, Thinking, 272, 452.
99. Stengers, Thinking, 494.
100. Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, 328.
Works Cited

Althaus, Horst. Hegel. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000.

Antognazza, Maria Rosa. Leibniz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011.
Baelard, Gaston. Lautréamont. Dallas, TX: e Dallas Institute, 1986.
Badiou, Alain. Conditions. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Beman, Frida. Gilles Deleuze. London: Reaktion Books, 2017.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Modern Library, 1944.
———. The Creative Mind. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2010.
———. Duration and Simultaneity. Manester, UK: Clinamen Press, 1999.
———. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books, 2005.
———. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1974.
Blaner, William. Heidegger’s Being and Time. New York: Continuum,
2006.
Brandom, Robert. A Spirit of Trust. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019.
Brennan, Chris. Hellenistic Astrology. Denver, CO: Amor Fati Publications,
2017.
Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. New York: Columbia University Press,
1987.
Cisney, Vernon. Deleuze and Derrida. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh
University Press, 2018.
Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen. The Big Lebowski. Los Angeles: Working Title
Films, 1998. Film.
Culp, Andrew. Dark Deleuze. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2016.
Cusa, Niolas of. On Learned Ignorance. Minneapolis, MN: Arthur J.
Banning Press, 2001.
Cusset, François. French Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008.
Dawid, Riard. String Theory and the Scientific Method. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books, 2002.
———. Cinema 1. New York: Continuum, 2005.
———. Cinema 2. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
———. “Deleuze on Whitehead and Leibniz.” 10/3/1987.
www.pierrejoris.com/blog/deleuze-on-whitehead-leibniz/.
———. Desert Islands and Other Texts. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2004.
———. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press,
1994.
———. Empiricism and Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press,
1991.
———. Essays Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997.
———. Expressionism in Philosophy. New York: Zone Books, 1990.
———. The Fold. New York: Continuum, 2006.
———. Foucault. New York: Continuum, 2006.
———. Francis Bacon. New York: Continuum, 2003.
———. “From Saer-Maso to Masoism.” Angelaki 9, no. 1 (2004): 125–
33.
———. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. London: Athalone Press, 1984.
———. Letters and Other Texts. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2020.
———. The Logic of Sense. London: Athalone Press, 1990.
———. Masochism. New York: Zone Books, 2006.
———. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
———. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press,
2006.
———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–
7.
———. Proust and Signs. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
———. “Sur Spinoza.” Cours Vincennes 09/12/1980.
www.webdeleuze.com/textes/20
———. Two Regimes of Madness. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007.
———. What Is Grounding? Grand Rapids, MI: Publishing, 2015.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guaari. Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1983.
———. Kafka. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
———. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987.
———. What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec
Claire Parnet, 1996, 47–8.
hps://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/lectures/en/ABCM
sRevised-NotesComplete051120_1.pdf.
———. Dialogues II. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008.
———. The Ear of the Other. New York: Soen Books, 1985.
———. The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
———. “Gilles Deleuze: On Forgiveness.” European Graduate School Video
Lectures, 2004. www.youtube.com/wat?v=I_r-
gr3ccik&list=PLDD498CDE04B51C2D.
———. “I’ll Have to Wander All Alone.” Tympanum, 1998.
hps://non.copyriot.com/ill-have-to-wander-all-alone-jacques-derrida-
on-gilles-deleuze/.
———. “An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion.” E-
flux Journal (2009). www.e-flux.com/journal/02/68495/an-interview-
with-jacques-derrida-on-the-limits-of-digestion/.
———. Memoires for Paul de Man. New York: Columbia University Press,
1989.
———. Monolingualism of the Other: Or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
———. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press,
1997.
———. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge, 1994.
———. Writing and Difference. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Derrida, Jacques, and Maurizio Ferraris. A Taste for the Secret. Cambridge,
UK: Polity, 2001.
Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy.
Indianapolis, IN: Hae, 1998.
Desmond, Timothy. Psyche and Singularity. Nashville, TN: Persistent Press,
2018.
Dosse, François. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Duffy, Simon B. Deleuze and the History of Mathematics. London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
———. The Logic of Expression. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
Duvernoy, Russell J. “Deleuze, Whitehead, and the ‘Beautiful Soul’.”
Deleuze and Guattari Studies 13, no. 2 (2019): 163–85.
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Ellis, John M. Against Deconstruction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1989.
Evrard, Renaud, Claudie Massicoe, and omas Rabeyron. “Freud as a
Psyical Researer: e Impossible Freudian Legacy.” Imágó Budapest
6, no. 4 (2017): 9–32.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. Ropley, UK: Zero Books, 2009.
Franz, Marie-Louise von, and James Hillman. Lectures on Jung’s Typology.
Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 2020.
Freud, Sigmund, and C. G. Jung. The Freud/Jung Letters. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994.
Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press,
1986.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Essential Goethe. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2016.
Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. New York: Norton, 2010.
Griffin, David Ray, et al. Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993.
Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology. London: Peliccan, 2018.
Hegel, G. W. F. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline,
Part 1, Science of Logic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2010.
———. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume III. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990.
———. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 3. Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
———. Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
———. The Philosophy of History. Kitener, Ontario: Batoe Books, 2001.
———. Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
———. Science of Logic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Heidegger, Martin. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom.
Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985.
Herring, Emily. “Henri Bergson, Celebrity.” Aeon, 2019.
hps://aeon.co/essays/henri-bergson-the-philosopher-damned-for-his-
female-fans.
Hillman, James. Archetypal Psychology: Uniform Edition of the Writings of
James Hillman, Volume 1. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 2015.
———. “Ba to Beyond.” In The Archetypal Process, edited by David Ray
Griffin. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990.
———. “On Senex Consciousness.” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal
Psychology and Jungian Thought (1970): 146–65.
———, ed. Puer Papers. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1991.
———. Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
———. Suicide and the Soul. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 2020.
Hillman, James, and Miael Ventura. We’ve Had a Hundred Years of
Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. New York: HarperOne,
1993.
Hippolyte, Jean. Logic and Existence. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997.
Hoinski, David Frank. Humanlife and the Advent of Philosophy.
Dissertation, Duquesne University, Fall 2013.
Hope, Robert H. A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung.
Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1999.
Houlgate, Stephen. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic. West Lafayee, IN:
Purdue University Press, 2005.
———. “Selling’s Critique of Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’.” The Review of
Metaphysics 53, no. 1 (September 1999): 99–128.
Inwood, Miael. Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
James, William. Pragmatism. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1995.
———. The Will to Believe, Human Immortality, and Other Essays in
Popular Philosophy. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1960.
———. Writings 1902–1910. New York: Library of America, 1988.
Jameson, Frederic. “Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze.” The South Atlantic
Quarterly 97, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 393–416.
Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Jenkins, Barbara. Eros and Economy. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Johnson, Laurie M. Ideological Possession and the Rise of the New Right.
New York: Routledge, 2019.
Jolley, Niolas. Leibniz. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Josephson-Storm, Jason A. The Myth of Disenchantment. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Jung, C. G. Alchemical Studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1967.
———. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1959.
———. C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1977.
———. Civilization In Transition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1970.
———. Man and His Symbols. New York: Anor Press, 1964.
———. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
———. Mysterium Coniunctionis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1977.
———. Symbols of Transformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1956.
———. Synchronicity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
———. Visions. London: Routledge, 1998.
Kaufman, Eleanor. “Betraying Well.” Criticism XLIV, no. 4 (2004): 651–9.
Keller, Catherine, and Anne Daniell. Process and Difference. Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 2002.
Kelly, Sean. Individuation and the Absolute. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press,
1993.
Kerslake, Christian. Deleuze and the Unconscious. New York: Continuum,
2007.
———. “Grounding Deleuze.” Radical Philosophy 148 (Mar–April 2008):
30–6.
———. Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2009.
Lango, John W. “Whitehead’s Actual Occasions and the New
Infinitesimals.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 25, no. 1
(Winter 1989): 29–39.
Laughland, John. Schelling Versus Hegel. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
Leibniz, G. W. Discourse on Metaphysics and The Monadology. Mineola,
NY: Dover, 2005.
———. Leibniz’s Monadology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
———. “A New Method for Finding Maxima and Minima …”
www.17centurymaths.com/contents/Leibniz/nova1.pdf.
Levy, O., ed. Friedrich Nietzsche: Selected Letters. London, UK: e Soho
Book Company, 1985.
Lucas, George R., Jr., ed. Hegel and Whitehead. Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
1986.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984.
MacLure, Maggie. “e ‘New Materialisms’: A orn in the Flesh of
Critical alitative Inquiry?” In Critical Qualitative Inquiry, edited by
Gaile Cannella, Miael Salazar Perez, and Penny Pasque. New York:
Routledge, 2015.
Magee, Glenn Alexander. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2008.
Main, Roderi, Christian McMillan, and David Henderson, eds. Jung,
Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole. New York: Routledge, 2020.
Malabou, Catherine. “Who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?” In Deleuze: A
Critical Reader, edited by Paul Paon. Cambridge, MA: Blawell
Publishers, 1996.
Marshall, Terence E. “Rousseau and Enlightenment.” Political Theory 6, no.
4 (November 1978): 421–55.
Marx, Karl. Capital I. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
May, Todd. “Explain Deleuze to Me.” Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour,
2020. hps://soundcloud.com/podcast-co-coopererry/todd-may-
explain-deleuze-to-me-dont-dumb-it-down.
———. Gilles Deleuze. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
McMillan, Christian. “Jung and Deleuze: Enanted Openings to the Other:
A Philosophical Contribution.” International Journal of Jungian Studies
10, no. 3 (2018): 184–98.
Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2002.
Mill, John Stuart. Collected Works, Volume 10. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Mills, Jon, ed. Jung and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2019.
Milne, Drew. “e Beautiful Soul: From Hegel to Bee.” Diacritics 32 no.
1 (Mar 2002): 63–82.
Nietzse, Friedri. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
———. Beyond Good and Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003.
———. The Birth of Tragedy. London: Penguin, 1994.
———. Daybreak. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
———. Ecce Homo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
———. The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
———. Human, All Too Human. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996.
———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011.
———. Twilight of the Idols. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
———. Untimely Meditations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997.
Noale, Laurent. The Relativity of All Things. Nashville, TN: Persistent
Press, 2019.
Paon, Paul, and John Protevi, eds. Between Derrida and Deleuze. London:
Athlone Press, 2002.
Peeters, Benoit. Derrida. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016.
Pinkard, Terry. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001.
Plato. Complete Works. Indianapolis, IN: Hae, 1997.
———. Phaedrus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
———. A Plato Reader. Indianapolis, IN: Hae, 2012.
Plotinus. Enneads. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Price, Lucien. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. Boston: Lile, Brown
and Company, 1954.
Prideaux, Sue. I Am Dynamite! London: Tim Duggan Books, 2019.
Ramey, Joshua. The Hermetic Deleuze. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2012.
Reyes, Mielle A. “e Beautiful Soul in the Confessional.” ABO:
Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 4, no. 2 (2014).
hps://solarcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol4/iss2/1/.
Riardson, Joan. A Natural History of Pragmatism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1977.
Rowland, Susan. Jung: A Feminist Revision. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002.
Rush, Fred. “Selling’s Critique of Hegel.” In Interpreting Schelling, edited
by Lara Ostaric. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Russell, Bertrand. “e Philosophy of Bergson.” The Monist 22 (1912): 321–
47.
Saban, Mark. “Simondon and Jung: Rethinking Individuation.” In Holism,
edited by Christian McMillan, Roderi Main, and David Henderson.
New York: Routledge, 2019.
Salmon, Peter. An Event, Perhaps. New York: Verso, 2020.
Salomé, Lou. Nietzsche. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Selling, F. W. J. The Grounding of Positive Philosophy. Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 2008.
———. Grundlegung der Positiven Philosophie: Münchener Vorlesung WS
1832/33 und SS 1833. Turin: Boega D’Erasmo, 1972.
———. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007.
———. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006.
———. System of Transcendental Idealism. Charloesville, VA: University
Press of Virginia, 1978.
Shamdasani, Sonu. Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Shaviro, Steven. Without Criteria. Cambridge, MA: e MIT Press, 2012.
Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and
Information. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Sommers-Hall, Henry. Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013.
Spinoza, Baru. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume 1. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1985.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Continuity and Infinitesimals.” 2013.
hps://plato.stanford.edu/entries/continuity/.
Stengers, Isabelle. Another Science Is Possible. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018.
———. “Beyond Conversation.” In Process and Difference, edited by
Catherine Keller and Anne Daniell. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002.
———. In Catastrophic Times. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015.
———. Cosmopolitics I and II. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2010.
———. “Deleuze and Guaari’s Last Enigmatic Message.” Angelaki 10, no. 2
(2005): 151–67.
———. “Reclaiming Animism.” e-flux, no. 36 (2012). www.e-
flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/.
———. Thinking with Whitehead. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2011.
———. “Wondering About Materialism.” In The Speculative Turn, edited by
Levi Bryant, Ni Srnicek, and Graham Harman. Melbourne: re.press,
2011.
Stengers, Isabelle, and Philippe Pignarre. Capitalist Sorcery. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Stevens, Anthony. Jung: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
Strogatz, Steven. Infinite Powers. Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2020.
Tarnas, Riard. Cosmos and Psyche. New York: Viking, 2006.
———. “Is the Modern Psye Undergoing a Rite of Passage?” 2001.
hps://cosmosandpsye.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/revision-rite-of-
passage.pdf.
———. The Passion of the Western Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991.
Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Van Den Akker, Robin, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen.
Metamodernism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Lilefield, 2017.
Voltaire. Candide. New York: Norton, 2016.
Wahl, Jean. “Review of Nietzse and Philosophy.”
www.academia.edu/31298254/Jean_Wahl_Review_of_Deleuzes_Nietzs
e_and_Philosophy_Rough_translation_.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other
Writings. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
Wehr, Demaris S. Jung and Feminism. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Westphal, Merold. “Hegel Between Spinoza and Derrida.” In Hegel’s
History of Philosophy, edited by David A. Duquee. Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 2003.
Whitehead, Alfred North. In Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His
Philosophy, edited by George L. Kline. University Press of America,
1989.
———. Essays in Science and Philosophy. London: Rider & Co., 1948.
———. An Introduction to Mathematics. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2017.
———. Modes of Thought. New York: e Free Press, 1968.
———. Process and Reality. New York: e Free Press, 1985.
———. Science and the Modern World. New York: e Free Press, 1967.
Wilshire, Bruce. “e Breathtaking Intimacy of the Material World.” In The
Cambridge Companion to William James, edited by Ruth Anna
Putnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Winelmann, Johann Joaim. Johann Joachim Winckelmann on Art,
Architecture, and Archaeology. Roester, NY: Camden House, 2013.
Wigenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New York:
Routledge, 2001.
Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Spinoza and Other Heretics, Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Notes on a Debate ‘From Within the People’.” Criticism 46,
no. 4 (2004): 661–6.
———. Organs Without Bodies. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Index

L’Abécédaire 166, 209

absolute idealism 108, 111–12, 115
active imagination 187–8
affect: Deleuze on 237–40; Hillman on 269–70, 272, 305; James on 109, 123,
131–5, 137–9, 141; Jung on 174–5; Spinoza on 37–8; Stengers on 328;
Whitehead on 154–9
alemy: active imagination and 187–8; emical processes in 173, 175–6;
coniunctio 178; danger in 174–5; Hillman on 295–6; integration and 191;
primary purpose of 179–80, 181; Self in 184–5, 190
amor fati 26, 212, 328
anima 276, 296–7
Animal That Therefore I Am, The 14
animism 9, 77–8, 104, 162, 181, 239, 249, 273, 280, 297–8; Hillman on 276;
Stengers on 310–11, 314–18
Another Science Is Possible 311, 317–18
Antichrist, The 201
Anti-Oedipus 22, 167, 206–7, 278, 305
Apollonian, the 94–8, 103–4; Deleuze on 234; and the Dionysian 102, 104–
5
Apology 101
Aquinas, T. 171
aretypal cosmology 192, 313
aretypal psyology 268–9
aretype 168–70, 176–80, 231, 245; of the Self 183–5, 190; of wholeness
184, 187, 302–3
Aristotle 71, 72, 73–4
astrology 167–8, 313–14

Baelard, G. 9, 186
Bacon, R. 171
beautiful soul 212–22
Beman, F. 166, 207
Bergson, H. 1–2, 7, 14, 26; on calculus 134; on duality and opposition 139;
on duration 134, 135–6; on epos 141; on final causation 135–7; on
formal causation 137–9; on integration 141–2; on instinct 128, 131–3; on
intelligence 126–7, 131–2; on intuition 138–9, 141–3; on Jung 165; on
Spinoza 32; on teleology 39; on the vital impulse 127; Whitehead and
144
Bergsonism 167, 226
Beyond Good and Evil 39–40
biography 207–8
Birth of Tragedy, The 87, 89, 91, 92, 102–3, 201; as integrative 83
body without organs 33, 226
brain, the 129–30
Butler, J. 200

Calculemus 25, 46, 312, 322–3

calculus 6, 25, 42, 249; Bergson on 134; Deleuze on 233, 252; Hegel on 53;
Leibniz on 46–8, 49–50; Whitehead on 147–8
capitalism 119, 193, 275–7, 284
Capitalism and Schizophrenia 167, 268
Capitalist Sorcery 311, 317–18, 322–3
Cartesian dualism 35–7, 150, 157, 159–60, 162–3
Catholic Chur 119
causation see efficient causation; final causation; formal causation
Christianity 60–1, 161; David Strauss and 87; Jung and 171–2; knowledge
of good and evil and 189–90; lapis philosophorum and 173, 178–9, 186;
 monocentrism of 26; Nietzse on 87–8, 99, 217; rise of monotheism and
77–8; solastic 172–3
Cinema 1 167, 225
cinematographical meanism of thought 134
Cisney, V. 6
common notions 36–7
Communist Manifesto, The 14
concrescence 150–1, 154–5, 158
Confessions of a Beautiful Soul Written by Herself 213
conservatism 192–3
conspiracy theory 301
constructivism 4–5, 7, 109, 160; immanence as 34
contrasts 152–3
Copernicus, N. 60–1
Cosmopolitics 311–12
Creative Evolution 107, 126

daimonion 101–2
deconstruction 1–9, 11, 14, 160–1, 318; constructivism and 4–5, 7;
integration and 1, 19–20; liberation from 15–16; logocentrism and 11–13
Deleuze, G. xi, 1–9, 14, 21, 22, 23, 53, 65, 284; on alemy 181; on
aretypes 168–70; on the beautiful soul 212–22; on biography 207–8;
on calculus 233, 252; ildhood and family of 208–10; concept of Ideas
247–8; on construction of the Self 253–4; on constructivist logic 42;
constructive orientation of 200; critique of Hegel 200–3, 210–11, 223–6;
deterritorialization 207; on epos 249, 260; on final causation 241–2; on
formal causation 237–8, 241–2, 258–9; on Freud 201–2, 232, 240, 253; on
Idea of the negative 249–50; on image of thought 235–6; on immanence
34; Jung and 165–71, 181, 242–3; on madness 248; as metaphysicians 26–
7; on multiplicity 251, 253, 259; on the Oedipal complex 206–7; on
oppositional rationality 203–5, 229–30; on Platonism 228, 245; on Plato’s
method of division 244; on polytheism 229, 239, 243–5, 247–50, 255, 257;
rejection of the dialectic 224–5; on repetition 43, 80, 226–7, 231–3;
 rumors about sexuality 211; Spinoza and 32–3, 39–40; Stengers and
310–11, 318–20; on transcendental empiricism 33, 237–8; on Wahl 201;
Whitehead and 144; on writing philosophy 256; see also Difference and
Repetition
depression 303–4
depth psyology 271
Derrida, J. 1–8, 197; The Animal That Therefore I Am 14; on closure of on
différance 24; on concept of crisis 25–6; development of thought
through his career 13–14; difficulty in reading 15; on embarrassment 14;
on epos 12–13, 18–19, 21–2, 27–9; on final causation 25–6; on formal
causation 26–7; on the future 18–19; The Gift of Death 13–14, 15;
hermeneutics of suspicion 17; on logocentrism as heliocentric concept
28–9; on mythography 27–9; overturning of deconstruction 23–4; on
polytheism 13; reading of Rousseau 20–3; on temporality 27; see also Of
Grammatology
Descartes, R. 9, 22
Desmond, T. 188
determinism 39–43
deterritorialization 207
Dewey, J. 3
dialectic, the 2–3, 4; as collective philosophical creation 67–8; Deleuze’s
rejection of 224–5; Hegel’s concept of 55–62, 88–9, 108–9, 204–5, 223–4;
Nietzse’s concept of 93–4, 100; Selling’s concept of 65–8, 76
Dialogues II 167
Difference and Repetition xi, 24, 65, 166, 168, 205, 210–11, 268; on the
beautiful soul 212–21; Deleuze on 198; May 1968 in Paris and 199, 203–
4; see also Deleuze, G.
Dionysian, the 90–2, 95–8, 103–4; Deleuze on 234; music and 101–2; and
the Apollonian 102, 104–5
Discourse on Method 9
Dorn, G. 172
Dosse, F. 208
Duffy, S. 46, 48
duration 134, 135–6
Duvernoy, R. J. 218–19

Ecce Homo 89, 92–3, 217

efficient causation 41, 43, 118, 136–7, 151–2, 159
ego 173–4, 238–9, 292–4
Einstein, A. 127, 145
empiricism 109–11; speculative 324–5
Empiricism and Subjectivity 208, 219
enantiodromia 244
Encyclopedia Logic 142
Enlightenment, the 20, 45, 72, 77, 91, 145, 229, 289; Romantic reaction to
100; solasticism and 74, 171; scientific rationality in 104, 116, 149
Enneads 271
epos 5, 7, 55–6, 244, 250, 329; Bergson 141; Deleuze on 249, 260; Derrida
on 12–13, 18–19, 21–2, 27–9; Hegel on 57; Hillman on 279, 289–90;
James 119; Jung 188; Nietzse 88, 104; Selling on 79; Stengers on 314,
325–6; Whitehead 149–50, 158–63
errancy 23, 155, 305–6
eternal objects 153–4
Ethics (Spinoza) 32, 35, 36, 37, 40
evolution 126–9, 131–2; natural selection and 136

feminism 285–6
Fite, J. G. 3
final causation: Bergson on 135–7; Deleuze on 241–2; Derrida on 25–6;
Hegel on 56, 61–2; Hillman on 269, 299; James on 115, 118, 120–1;
Leibniz on 48–9; Nietzse on 40, 97; Selling on 78; Spinoza on 25–6,
39–40; Stengers on 321; Whitehead on 145, 150–2, 154–5
Fisher, M. 284
Fold, The 252
formal causation 137–8, 241–2; Bergson on 137–9; Deleuze on 237–8, 241–
2, 258–9; Derrida on 26–7; James on 118; Jung on 167, 191; Leibniz on
 46; Spinoza on 38–41, 43; Stengers on 321; Whitehead on 151–4
Foucault 241–2
Foucault, M. 5, 197, 199, 200, 211
free association 168
freedom, brain complexity and 129–30
Freud, S.: Deleuze on 201–2, 232, 240, 253; Hillman on 278, 282–3, 285–8;
Jung and 165–8, 170–1, 176, 194, 202, 240, 253, 283, 285–8; Nietzse and
83, 283

Galileo 61, 145, 327

Gebser, J. 191, 301
Gide, A. 277
Gift of Death, The 13–14, 15
God 49; Deleuze on 239; in the Hebrew Bible 78; Jung on 183–4; Leibniz
on 50; Spinoza on 33, 38; Whitehead on 315–17, 328
gods see polytheism
Goethe, J. W. von 213–14, 222
good and evil 189–90
Greek mythology 78–9, 94, 290–1, 293, 304
Grof, S. 294
Grounding of Positive Philosophy, The 64, 65, 67, 69, 75
Guaari, F. 7, 9, 21, 22, 23, 166–71, 181, 284; on the Oedipal complex 206,
209, 212; see also Deleuze, G.

Habermas, J. 64
Harman, G. 225
Hartshorne, C. 153
Hebrew Bible 78
Hegel, G. W. F. 2–4, 6–8, 20–1, 32, 140, 142; on calculus 53; concept of the
dialectic 55–62, 88–9, 108–9, 204–5, 223–4; Deleuze’s critique of 200,
201, 202–3, 210–11, 223–6; on epos 57; on final causation 56, 61–2;
James on 108; Nietzse and 86, 88–9; on opposition 54–7, 59–60, 61;
Selling and 52, 64–70; on sublation 57–8, 62; Whitehead and 146–8
Heidegger, M. 5, 12, 64
Heraclitus 2, 9, 271
Hermetic Deleuze, The 219
hermeticism 219, 284–5
Herring, E. 285
Hillman, J. 1–2, 8, 14, 23, 268; on alemy 295–6; on autonomy of fantasy
295; on enacting repetitions with variations 274–5; on engagement with
imaginal figures 282–3, 296–7; on engagement with nonrational modes
276–7; on epos 279, 289–90; on final causation 269, 299; on Freud 278,
282–3, 285–8; on Greek myth 290–1; Jung’s influence on 165–6, 284–5,
287–8; on origins of depth psyology 271; on personifying 268–9; on
polytheism 270, 272, 274–6, 278–82, 288–90, 292–4, 296–305; on
reengagement with the gods 278–82, 301–2; on sizophrenia 277–8
Hippolyte, J. 53, 211
Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology 64
Hölderlin, F. 52
horizon of conception 24, 35, 75, 238, 258–9
Houlgate, S. 70
humanism 305

idealism 3, 4, 54, 91, 118, 216, 224, 225; absolute 108, 111–12, 115; Deleuze’s
rejection of 286; Hegel and 52, 114, 149, 197; Nietzse and 91;
transcendental 67
Ideas 228, 246–8
image of thought 235–6, 318
immanence 32–5, 38–9; as constructivism 34; of God 32–3, 315–16;
Leibnizian calculus and 35
In Catastrophic Times 311, 317–18
individuation 174, 215, 253–4; Deleuze on 232–3, 254; projection and 177,
286; Stengers on 320–1
Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information 169, 320–1
infinitesimals 6, 25, 35, 42, 46–8, 50, 134; Bergson on 134; Deleuze on 252;
Hegel on 53; Whitehead on 147–8
initiation 65, 73, 104, 180–2, 185, 188, 219, 224, 246, 250, 257, 277, 299, 319;
collective 79, 88, 289, 292–3, 302–3
instinct 128, 131–3
intellect: evolution of 126–7, 131–2; freedom of oice and 129–30; instinct
and 128, 131–2; integrated with instinct 132–3
Introduction to Mathematics, An 147
intuition 36–7, 138–9, 141–3

Jacobi, J. 191
James, W. 1–4, 14, 32, 53, 88; on absolute idealism 111–12, 115; on epos
119; on Hegel 108–9; on empiricism 109–10; on final causation 115, 118,
120–1; Jung and 165; on mystical states 110; on the pragmatic method
113–14; on pluralism 122–3; on radical empiricism 110–11, 117;
Whitehead and 144
Jarry, A. 27
Jaspers, K. 64
Jenkins, B. 167, 179
Johnson, L. M. 192
Jung, C. G. xi, 1–3, 8, 14, 83; on active imagination 187–8; on alemy
172–82; on aretypes 168–70, 176–80, 190; Deleuze and 165–71, 181,
242–3; on the ego 173–4; on epos 188; and Freud 165–8, 170–1, 176,
194, 202, 240, 253, 283, 285–8; Hillman and 165–6, 284–5, 287–8; on the
nigredo 188–91; and politics 192–3; sizophrenia and 287; on
synronicity 191–2, 232, 257

Kaa, F. 168
Kant, I. 3, 20, 52, 71, 134
Kelly, S. 177
Kant’s Critical Philosophy 245
Kepler, J. 61

Lacan, J. 5
Laing, R. D. 277, 278
Lango, J. W. 147
lapis philosophorum 173, 178–9, 186–7
Latour, B. 144
Laughland, J. 68
Lautréamont 169, 186
law of excluded middle 53, 55
Leibniz, G. W. 1–3, 6, 32–3, 35; on calculus 46–8, 49–50; Calculemus 25, 46;
on final causation 48–9; on formal causation 46; on infinitesimals 47, 50,
147; mathesis universalis 25; on monads 48–9; an optimism 49–50, 233,
328; see also Monadology
Le Misogyne 213
Leroi-Gourhan, A. 27
Lévinas, E. 22
Lévi-Strauss, C. 20, 28
Logic and Existence 211
Logic of Sense, The 167, 268
logocentrism 11–13, 17–18, 20, 24, 25, 28–9
Luna 185–6
Lyotard, J-F. 7

Magnus, A. 171, 172

Malabou, C. 200, 201–2, 217–18
Marx, K. 3, 52
Maslow, A. 279
materialism 54, 118–19, 136
mathematics and metaphysics 147–8
mathesis universalis 25
Matter and Memory 138, 226, 236
Maxwell, J. C. 311
May, T. 284
Meaning of Truth, The 110
Mercurius 179, 184–7, 190–1
Merleau-Ponty, M. 64
metamodernism 5
metaphysical empiricism 74–6
meta-rationality 28
method of division 18, 244
Mill, J. S. 112
Monadology 45–6, 48
monads 48–50
monism 54, 110
monotheism 73, 76, 77–8, 290; Stengers on 315–16
multiplicity 251, 253, 259
music 101–2
Mysterium Coniunctionis xi, 165, 171–3, 181, 185
mythology 188–9; deities of Greek 78–9, 94, 290–1, 293, 304; and dialectic
90–1, 244–5; philosophy of 76–8

natural selection 136

negative philosophy 71–2
negative prehensions 150–1, 153, 154
Neoplatonists 73–4
Newton, I. 6, 46–7
Niolas of Cusa 172, 200, 224
Nietzse, F. 2–3, 7, 9, 12, 14, 17, 28, 70; on the Apollonian 94–8, 103–4; on
the dialectic 93–4, 100, 103–4; on critical consciousness 99–100; as
critical diagnostician 83–4; on Christianity 87–8, 99, 217; on descent 97–
8; on the Dionysian 90–2, 95–8, 103–4; on dreams 94–6; on epos 88,
104; on final causation 40, 97; on Greek art and mythology 94–6; Hegel
and 86, 88–9; influences on 83; on music 101–2; on the Overman 38, 84,
92, 133, 201, 231; on possibility of reconciliation of Apollonian and
Dionysian 91–3; on resssentiment 22, 84, 88, 207, 212; on Socrates 87, 90,
98–100; suffering of 85–7, 89, 90–1; see also Birth of Tragedy, The
Nietzsche and Philosophy 88, 167, 201, 245
nigredo 188–91
Nirvana 179
“Number of Yes, A” 13

Oedipal complex 206, 209, 212, 304–5

Of Grammatology 2, 11–29
Of Human Freedom 64–5
optimism 49–50, 233, 328
ordeal see initiation
Overman 38, 84, 92, 133, 201, 231

pantheism 36
paradoxes 122, 128, 178
pataphysics 26–7
patriary 88, 179, 185, 187, 190–1, 213, 285
Peirce, C. S. 107
personifying 268–9, 298–9, 303
Phaedrus 248, 255, 271
Phenomenology of Spirit, The 52–4, 64, 65, 68, 70, 205
Plato 9, 15, 20–1, 32, 101, 103; Ideas 138; method of division 18, 244
Platonism 26, 236, 244–6
Plotinus 271
pluralism 54, 228, 110, 122–3, 228
politeness 326
political ideologies 192–4
polytheism: Deleuze on 229, 239, 243–5, 247–50, 255, 257; Derrida on 13;
Hillman on 270, 272, 274–6, 278–82, 288–90, 292–4, 296–305; Selling
on 70–1, 73, 76–80; Stengers on 314–17
positive philosophy 71–80
postmodernism 4–5, 8, 56
poststructuralism 20, 149
potency 67, 70–1, 73, 239–40, 251–2
pragmatism 107, 110, 112, 126, 197, 205; see also James, W.
Principles of Psychology, The 3
Prinicpia Mathematica 147
Process and Reality xi, 144, 147–8
projection 177, 193–4, 286
propaganda 193
Protestant Reformation 119
Protevi, J. 14
Proust and Signs 167, 226
Psyche and Singularity 188
psyoanalysis 165, 176, 279, 284
Psychology of the Unconscious 287
psyopathology 279–80, 291
psyo-philosophy 310

quantum meanics 103, 123

queer theory 285

radical empiricism 23, 73, 110–11, 117

radical finalism 39, 41, 136, 137
Ramey, J. 219, 284
rationality 104, 109–11, 116, 149, 203–5, 229–31, 250, 275–6, 289, 293–4
Red Book, The 287
repetition 43, 80, 226–7, 231–3
resssentiment 22, 84, 88, 207, 212
Re-Visioning Psychology 268–9
responsibility 184, 305, 328–9
Reyes, M. A. 213
Rhine, J. B. 191
Robinson, A. 147
Roger, A. 213
Romanticism 20, 100, 289
Rousseau, J.-J. 20–3, 28
Rowland, S. 179
Russell, B. 127, 146
Salmon, P. 14, 22
Salome, L. 217, 283
Saussure, F. d. 20, 25
Selling, F. W. J. 2–3, 9, 14, 28, 53; on the absolute 68–9; on the dialectic
65–8, 76; on empiricism 72–3; on epos 79; on final causation 78; Hegel
and 52, 64–70; influence on Nietzse 83; on metaphysical empiricism
74–6; on monotheism 73, 76, 77–8; on negative and positive
philosophies 71–80; on Neoplatonists 73–4; on philosophy of mythology
66–7, 76–9; on polytheism 70–1, 73, 76–80; theory of potencies 67, 70–1;
on transformative crises 79–80
sizophrenia 277–8, 287
solasticism 74, 149, 171, 172–3
Srodinger, E. 246
Sulz, W. 64
Science of Logic, The 52–3, 70, 147
scientia generalis 46
Self, the 183–5, 190, 253–4, 269
self-consciousness 35, 56–7, 60
Shaviro, S. 5
Simondon, G. 9, 320–1
Socrates 72, 248; as agent of rationality 99–100; daimonion of 101–2;
Nietzse on 87, 90, 98–100; Selling on 71–2
Sol 184–6
Sommers-Hall, H. 200, 225
Sophists 20, 247, 318
Specters of Marx 14, 18
speculative empiricism 324–5
Spinoza, B. 2–3, 7; on affects 37–8; on determinism 39–43; exploration of
oppositions 35–6; on final causation 25–6, 39–40; on formal causation
38–41, 43; on immanence 33–5; influence on Nietzse 83; pantheism
36; on three kinds of knowledge 36–7
Statesman, The 244
Stengers, I. 1–9, 14; Another Science Is Possible 311, 317–18; on astrology
313–14; Capitalist Sorcery 311, 317–18, 322–3; In Catastrophic Times
311, 317–18; Cosmopolitics 311–12; on epos 314, 325–6; on final
causation 321; on God 315–16, 317, 327–8; on Leibniz’s concept of
Calculemus 25, 322–3; on peace fighters 323; on politeness 326; on
polytheism 314–17; spectulative empiricism and 324–5; Thinking With
Whitehead 2, 23, 311, 313, 315–16
Strauss, D. 87
sublation 57–8, 62
Suicide and the Soul 292–3
synronicity 167, 191–2, 232, 257, 294
Synchronicity 191

Tarnas, R. 173
teleology see final causation
tertium non datur 53, 55
Theodicy 47–8
Thinking With Whitehead 2, 23, 311, 313, 315–16
Thousand Plateaus, A 166, 169, 202, 203, 231, 283
Thus Spoke Zarathustra 87
Timaeus 72
Tournier, M. 210
transcendental empiricism 33–5, 73–4, 197, 237–8, 240, 246, 251
transversality 43, 167

univocity 32–5, 37, 183, 227

Varieties of Religious Experience, The 110

Voltaire 49

Wagner, R. 101
Wahl, J. 83, 200, 201
Weber, M. 83
Wehr, D. S. 179
What Is Grounding? 208, 219, 243, 248
What Is Philosophy? 207, 252
Whitehead, A. N. xi, 1–5, 8, 14, 45, 107, 218; on calculus 147–8; on
concrescence 150–1, 154–5, 158; on epos 149–50, 158–63; on eternal
objects 153–4; on final causation 145, 150–2, 154–5; on formal causation
153–4; on infinitesimals 147–8; on mysticism 162; on negative
prehensions 150–1, 153, 154; on positive contrast 152–3; on process 145,
150, 151; on Hegel 146–7; Stengers and 310–11, 318–20, 324–5; on
transcendence 158
wholeness, aretype of 184, 187, 302–3
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 212
Winelmann, J. J. 212
Wirth, J. M. 76
Wigenstein, L. 144

Žižek, S. 52, 167, 197, 200, 202