The Society of the Study of Difference held on 8 November 2007 a panel session on Deleuze and the Ontology of Difference at the conference organized by Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy at Chicago.

To discuss Deleuze and the Ontology of Difference, Jeffrey Bell (Southeastern Louisiana University),  Constantin Boundas(Trent University) - whose paper was read by Andreas Elpidorou - and  Arsalan Memon (independent scholar) kindly accepted to present a number of difference-related papers in session that was chaired by Hugh Silverman (Stony Brook University).

The Time of Our Life: Deleuze, Culture, and Creative Events

The guiding problematic in this essay will be the attempt to clarify the relationship between creative events and the historical actualities that function as context and/or cause for these events. A number of attempts to address this problematic will be discussed, including Max Weber’s theory of singular causality, Fritz Ringer’s appropriation of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the intellectual field, and Randall Collins’ sociological theory of intellectual change. Each of these approaches, we argue, ultimately places creative events in relationship to the actualities that condition them, and yet it is precisely the effort of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, by contrast, to understand how creative events go beyond the actual, or entail a fundamental non-relation to the actual. It is at this point where the historical ontology we argue is at work in Deleuze’s philosophy becomes especially relevant, for integral to our understanding of historical ontology is a counter-causality that allows for the non-relation between creative events and their actual historical and cultural conditions. To clarify these points we will turn to a discussion of Kafka. Kafka’s writings are particularly appropriate here, for while being recognized as one of the most creative of writers, Kafka’s writings have nonetheless been given a number of causal explanations (e.g., his relationship to his father). With Deleuze’s Humean transcendental empiricism, however, an empiricism we shall briefly contrast with the work of Benjamin, Blanchot, Bergson, Agamben, and Badiou, we will be able to clarify further the counter-causal nature of creative events. Through an analysis of Kafka’s life, therefore, whereby life is understood as immanence –  following through here on a theme from Deleuze’s last published piece (“Immanence: a life …”) – we will come to see that historical ontology is the process whereby the indeterminate, i.e., life, becomes determinable. A historical ontology is thus the staging of identity, the process inseparable from the entities that come to play a part on the stage of actuality.

Forestry Paths and Lines of Flight: Deleuze on Heidegger - read by Andreas Elpidorou

In his book, Truth and Genesis, Miguel de Beistegui presented Heidegger and Deleuze as the most radical philosophers of difference that we have had and tried to establish their complementarity. While I accept the claim about their radical-ness, I have serious doubts about their complementarity. In this paper, I argue that, although Heidegger may have anticipated few of the concepts by means of which Deleuze, later on, constructed his own philosophy, he had built by means of them a very different dwelling. With Deleuze, the ontology of Being and Time was challenged and replaced by the ontology (?) of Difference and Repetition. The symbols that had for a long time sustained hermeneutic piety were displaced by the a-signifying semeia of a joyful rhizomatics. The ethics of resoluteness and of wanting to be guilty gave way to the ethics of doing away with judgment and striving to be worthy of the event. The politics of the authentic response to the call of Being were transcended in the becoming-nomadic of an ‘inferior race.’ The ‘truthing’ of the artwork was bracketed for the sake of the hystericisation of the body. Forestry paths were crisscrossed by lines of flight. If, as Peter Sloterdijk argued recently, Heidegger is the philosopher of movement, Deleuze is the philosopher of becoming, and becoming is not movement

Deleuze contra Badiou: Univocity of Being ≠ Platonism

Is Being [l’être] said in one or many ways? This is what has been come to be known as the metaphysical problem of the one and the many. Although the problem dates back to the pre-Socratics, it is still very much of great concern in this day and age. And it is precisely on this problematic plateau that the dialogical event [événement] between two contemporary thinkers, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou, takes place.

Even in this post-modern era, both figures have propounded an ontology, but not at the expense of sacrificing multiplicities or differences. Badiou, regarding Deleuze’s philosophy, however, would disagree with such a contention. That is, despite Deleuze’s constant struggle of overturning Platonism, Badiou, in his book, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being [Deleuze: La clameur de l’Etre], adamantly argues that “Deleuzianism is fundamentally a Platonism with a different accentuation.” Badiou’s controversial proclamation is based on Deleuze’s rendering of Being as univocal (i.e. Being is said in one way). It is at the intersection of the deterritorialization and the reterritorialization of such a claim that the territorialization of our essay takes place.

To be precise, the singularly multiple questions that eventuate at this intersection are the following: does the Deleuzean univocity of Being terminate and/or swallow the continuous production of multiplicities? By espousing a univocity of Being, is Deleuze reintroducing the very transcendence that he excluded from his plane of immanence? Since Deleuze’s ontology is a pluralism that is based upon a monism, is this an adherence to an implicit or masked Platonism? These Badiouian questions demand a response and such is the task of this essay.