The Society of the Study of Difference held a panel session on October 16 at the conference organized by Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy at Pittsburg.

For this session, Mary Beth Mader (University of Memphis),  Roland Faber (Claremont Graduate University) and  Hugh Silverman (Stony Brook University) have kindly accepted to present a number of difference-related papers. The session was chaired by John Protevi (Louisiana State University).

Difference, Death, and Divinity: Towards a Poststructuralist Mystagogy of Becoming

For more than a decade, my research has been engaged in a rediscovery of Alfred N. Whitehead’s work in the context of both poststructuralist philosophy and (as odd as it might seem) constructive theology. What at first glance looks dangerously dysfunctional and mutually exclusive has led me to think intensively about the rhizomatic connections between Whitehead and Deleuze, on the one hand, and points of contact “on the interstices” of poststructuralism and theology, on the other. In order to explore this triangle further, my considerations will seek resonances in both Deleuze’s and Whitehead's endeavor to formulate a philosophy of becoming and conditions for genuine novelty by asking whether, and if so, in what sense, a trace of mystical language remains vital as a genuine expression of their respective philosophies of becoming, indicating a mystagogy of becoming.

The Difference of Intensity

In Difference and Repetition and several other texts, Gilles Deleuze revives, enriches, and makes central what has been a lesser tradition of ontological thought on the nature of intensity in Western philosophy.  Important historical moments in thought on the notion of intensity as intensive quantity include its treatments by Scotus, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Bergson.  That these accounts are relevant to Deleuze’s thought on the concept of intensity is well known.  The paper concentrates on a lesser-known chapter in Deleuze’s history of the concept of intensity, the medieval source in Nicolas Oresme.  The chief aim of the paper is to expose the operation of Deleuze’s ontology of intensity with specific reference to Oresme.  The examination is primarily restricted to a treatment of Deleuze’s ontology of intensity in relation to his ontology of the concept as it appears in What Is Philosophy?

 Standard physical descriptions of the world offered by the natural sciences include extensive expressions of intensities.  The natural sciences of intensities have their roots in philosophical accounts, specifically in ontologies developed in the philosophies of medieval European Christendom.  But Deleuze proposes an ontology of intensities that departs significantly from contemporary scientific discourses on intensive quantity.  For Deleuze’s position is that the expression of intensive quantities as extensive quantities necessarily loses the essential features of intensive quantity in that expression. The scientific expression of intensity in terms of extended quantities or in qualitative terms is necessarily misleading and inaccurate. The qualities and extensities of scientific thought are the derelict residues of intensities and differ ontologically from intensities.  In fact, for Deleuze extensities themselves would require description in terms of constituent intensities that have been annulled or cancelled out in and by extensive expressions. 

 The important point is that with respect to philosophy Deleuze rejects the historical transformations that converted the intensive quantities of medieval ontology into the extended quantities of modern science.  The paper seeks to add to our understanding of this history and Deleuze’s use of it through a focus on one of the early chapters of that history, Oresme’s medieval ontology of intensity, and its role in the history of the quantification of the difference of intensity.