Anti-Vitalism: Kaufman’s Deleuze of Inertia

 
There is quite a lot one might say, and that has already been said, about Gilles Deleuze. In the wake of the first wave of general guides and overviews, there are now a number of Deleuzes from which to choose. There is the political, revolutionary, and transformational Deleuze who co-authored with Guattari, supplementing the latter’s anti-institutional mode of psychoanalysis with a broader notion of life as desire, which in turn inflected Deleuze’s single-authored works. There is the Bergsonian Deleuze focused on time, the Spinozist Deleuze of immanence, the Humean Deleuze who poses the problem of the imagination in its social and political forms, the Leibnizian Deleuze who affirms the perception of the infinite, and even the Kantian Deleuze concerned with the distinct and divergent faculties of thinking. There is—against all this—an anti-Deleuzian Deleuze: a Deleuze who (according to his better known critics) is so rarefied in his vision of the virtual that he has nothing to say about practical political intervention. Slavoj Žižek has insisted that it is this Deleuze—the Deleuze of the single-authored works, and not the political and revolutionary Deleuze who worked with Guattari—who arrives at a sterile dualism, in which thinking is isolated, subjective, and cut off from the world of action and events. Deleuze, Žižek insists, wants to be an immanent monist with a world of being that just is becoming, but ultimately something like a subject as nothingness returns:
 

 

This, then, is what Deleuze seems to get wrong in his reduction of the subject to (just another) substance. Far from belonging to the level of actualization, of distinct entities in the order of constituted reality, the dimension of the “subject” designates the reemergence of the virtual within the order of actuality. “Subject” names the unique space of the explosion of virtuality within constituted reality. According to The Logic of Sense, sense is the immaterial flow of pure becoming, and “subject” designates not the substantial entity whose “predicate” (attribute, property, capacity) is the sense-event but a kind of antisubstance, a negative/inverted substance—the immaterial, singular, purely abstract point that sustains the flow of sense. This is why the subject is not a person. To put it in Deleuzian terms, “person” belongs to the order of actualized reality, designating the wealth of positive features and properties that characterize an individual, whereas the subject is divided precisely in the Deleuzian sense of “dividual” as opposed to individual.

(61)

 
Now it is this Deleuze—the Deleuze that most Deleuzians claim is not Deleuze at all so much as the consequence of a violent misreading—that Kaufman wants to claim as a Deleuze worth reading. The stakes would at first appear to be very low indeed, mainly to do with ontology and lineage. Kaufman asserts that Deleuze is closer to scholasticism (and especially to Aquinas) than we might think, and that he is not quite the philosopher of free, unbridled, and dynamic becoming that we might believe (and want) him to be. But there might be more to this rereading than a squabble amongst Francophile theorists: the Deleuze criticized by Peter Hallward, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou is a counter-political Deleuze, one whose conception of the virtual—because it is not subjective—does not allow us to think of how the virtual might amount to a decision or a transformation of this world. Indeed, Alain Badiou’s criticism of Deleuze links the problem of ontology to a certain mode of ethics (of which he happens to approve):
 

1. 1.
   This philosophy is organized around a metaphysics of the One.
2. 2.
   It proposes an ethics of thought that requires dispossession and asceticism.
3. 3.
   It is systematic and abstract. (17)

 
Dispossession and abstraction, for Badiou, are worthy of affirmation, precisely because contemporary ethical projects of inclusion, conciliation, and recognition ultimately yield a homogeneity that precludes any form of decision (and therefore any revolutionary change). For Badiou, thought is thought of the subject (and it is never quite clear how subjects are not coterminous with humans). The problem, for Badiou, lies between points one and two: if thought is ultimately at one with the world, then there is no distance of the subject. Without a subject abstraction and asceticism will not generate a political difference. Key here is the status of the virtual. As articulated by Žižek, the virtual reemerges with an “explosion.” In this respect the events that will disrupt the actuality of constituted life must take the form of disruption, and can only do so if we grant the existence of something like a subject; it may be that insofar as we are persons we are bound up with identity politics and already-formed interests that can only yield the same dull round of party politics. But the subject is not the person so much as the gap, distance, nothingness, or thinking negativity that will always be other than any designated, objectifiable self. For Badiou and Žižek, then, the break in actuality occurs by way of the subject, not because of some blessed rationality of human political sense, but precisely because we are always other than any of our rationalizations and interests. If, as they insist, Deleuze does not grant the subject this potentiality of distance, what we are left with is not so much a politics—a task of intervention and decision—but a passive affirmation, in which we are nothing more than the witnesses of events, and never their decisive cause. As articulated by Hallward, who for Kaufman offers the most incisive reading of a Deleuze less focused on revolutionary becoming than on a passivity or inertia that short-circuits the world of praxis and action, Deleuze offers nothing more than a philosophy of alignment:
 

To grasp an event is thus to align yourself in keeping with its determination, to embrace it as your destiny, as “yours” in a way that is utterly intimate (because it concerns you more profoundly than your actual interests or identity) and yet utterly impersonal (because it is both disinterested and non-identical). Consider again the event of a wound, or wounding. Deleuze will embrace unreservedly the amor fati of Stoic ethics: “my wound existed before me; I was born to embody it.” Understood as an event, the wound is not the result of inter-actual relations or causes. To accept my virtual wound is to disregard the process of its actual causation (and thus to forgo any temptation of regret).

(43)

 

The decision one makes about ontology—monism or dualism—yields an ethics: the break of the subject in a moment of ungrounded decision, or the passive affirmation of the One.

 
Perhaps, still, the pertinence of this philosophical dispute appears less than overwhelming. The opening of Kaufman’s book—a scholarly journey (or, as she refers to it, a “small study”) that pursues the gap of the virtual that is broken off from the subject of praxis, by way of Aquinas, Blanchot, Sartre, Kerouac, Melville, and others—does not seem to promise much in the way of what we might like to call political “relevance”:
 

At its most basic, this study argues for Deleuze as a powerful—perhaps the French twentieth century’s most powerful because most unrealized—thinker of stasis (which in Greek indicates both a standing still and an internal revolution or disturbance). But beyond that it claims this thought of stasis to be an outgrowth of ontological commitments, often downplayed in the critical literature and arguably by Deleuze himself, that are presented as a question of the genesis of structures, and what is beyond or outside the given structure, yet for that all the more crucial to its operation—essentially the zero or empty point of the structure, to draw on a structuralist vocabulary that Deleuze helps refine. It is the ongoing and implicitly generative role of the empty static point (the third synthesis of time) that this study seeks to consider in all its implications.

(1)

 

Great: the planet is hurtling towards ecological catastrophe; the former super power of the United States has become party-politicized to the point of paralysis; the global financial crisis has yielded nothing more than the cut, paste, and papier-mâché response of fix-as-you-collapse expediency; and now we have a philosopher of revolution and becoming hailed as the great thinker of stasis. With this much worldly, political, ideological, and economic stasis do we really need to provide an ontological and scholarly underpinning?

 
Yes, and the answer lies, clearly enough—after Kaufman’s exegesis of Aquinas, Sartre, Blanchot, and others—in running: “One might be led to ask, especially in light of Baudrillard’s celebrated analysis of America, whether it is possible for an exercise-obsessed American to think while jogging—or working out at the gym” (127). We get to the paralysis of running and the gym by way of Baudrillard, Blanchot, and America. So, let us accept something like Locke’s liberal individualist idea that, “in the beginning, all the world was America.” The self is born not as an individual with history and predicates, but simply as a power to… set over and against a virgin space. If that were so, one might lament the ways in which that same America of open freedom became a land of personal identity, of asserting who I am. And one might further lament the same American culture of self-affirmation becoming one of self-movement: becoming who you are; being nothing other than yourself; refusing to be limited by any external, transcendent, or other force. Once individuals become persons with integrity, self-affirmation, and self-cultivation as their end, it makes sense—as Badiou, Žižek and Hallward will do—to emphasize the otherness of the subject: that I am not the self that has made the world and the self its own. There would then be another America: not the America of property, identity, self-promotion, or winning friends and influencing people, but an America of the road, of flight, of open space—of a becoming that is not limited by the being of the individual.
 
This America has perhaps been a primarily literary phenomenon, one that tends to be rather European (and therefore complicated). One might think of the ways in which Henry James seemed at once to celebrate the open, history-free, and childlike gaze of the American girl (Daisy Miller), against the weight of the prestige, received ideas, and property of old Europe. But that same Henry James also presented the ugly emptiness of new world money that had rid itself of taste, tradition, and languid perception, with James’s refined Europeans finding some solace in the remnants, ruins, and fragments of aestheticism. This problem of America—at once the land of new, open space freed from the rigidity of the past, and an infantile haven of unthinking movement and puerile renewal—brings us back to running. For Kaufman, the “out of this world” Deleuze that emerges from Peter Hallward’s critique might offer us the most fruitful way to think about America and the paralysis or absence of thought epitomized by running and gym-going.
 
Kaufman argues against life, vitalism, becoming, and movement for a Deleuze of inertia. This Deleuze will probably not be political, and he may not be human, but he may well be ethical. The argument proceeds in this fashion: at the level of exegesis Kaufman wants to mark a Deleuze who is distinct from Guattari, and even from the Deleuze of monism. The virtual cannot be aligned with desire, and certainly not with human potentiality, and therefore not with a subject. What if the virtual were given in what Kaufman describes, following the Deleuze of Difference and Repetition, as the third synthesis of time? Imagine time not as the tracked movements that occur across space (such as the arc of the sun rising and setting, the hands of a clock moving, or the time taken to run one mile), nor as the way in which we think about history or our past and future. Imagine time as sub specie aeternitatis. If one were not oneself, not located in the here and now, but present at all points of the world, all at once—out of this world, as if nowhere—then the events of the world would be neither in the past, nor about to arrive, but would at once be present in this infinite time and not present because not now. It is this time and this virtual separation and distance from the actual that Kaufman finds in the Deleuze she wants to save both from his fans (the Deleuzians who take the virtual to be the political potentiality of freedom, action, and becoming) and from the anti-Deleuzians who want to grant potentiality a site of subjective political force. Why? Running.
 
Treadmill running, running to get fit, running to get high, running to burn off that pizza, running to win: these are movements of survival and of the body. I run to become, and I become and run. We could expand this “running on the spot” to include most of what counts as politics: keep moving, working, improving, and feeling good in order to survive. Running is biopolitics par excellence: we humans need to sustain ourselves, to avoid the inertia of being static consumers. We are not running to go anywhere else, but running to achieve what only running can—the maximization of the body’s potentiality and becoming. Banking is akin to running: plenty of exchange, relations, movements, trading—even desiring—but movements and exchange freed from anything other than itself. Surely what we need, then, is real movement. And this is Hallward/Badiou/Žižek’s point: Deleuze gives us no way of allowing the virtual to make a political difference. Indeed, Deleuzism appears almost like a philosophical treadmill: think because thinking itself is a type of movement (immaterial, ungrounded, not subjective, and certainly not mine.)
 
Kaufman has other ideas. Let us counteract this frenzied motion of running and moving for movement’s sake with inertia: that dead spot or point of cramped space where we seem unable to go anywhere. To this end, she turns beyond the America of wide, open spaces, away from movement and towards character. Much has been written about Melville’s Bartleby and—to use the Italian Marxist rhetoric of Giorgio Agamben—the power of inoperativity. Bartleby’s inaction, his preference “not to,” might appear a form of inaction if one reads his actions from the point of the view of law, work, and writing; but there are two other modes of time according to which his gesture of refusal might be read. The first is that of a revolutionary break from the world of convention, purposive action, and already inscribed norms: Bartleby opens a space beyond the law that is not yet that of a determined other law. His seeming inaction, in terms of the actual law, is a revolutionary move in terms of an imagined future beyond the law. Kaufman finds in Bartleby, and in the possibility of character more generally, something other than a subjective break: there is an ethics, she insists, that is not that of movement, becoming, relationality, and encounter; but one of inertia, the interior, and a time that is not of this world: “It is my claim that this inertia, rather than marking a lesser or pathological state, may point to a new path for ontology” (152).
 
I would suggest that despite the modest opening claims of Kaufman’s book—that she is completing a work of Deleuzian exegesis that ties Deleuze to scholasticism, and that her claims are primarily ontological—the importance of this book may indeed be quite major. Return to the two motifs that Kaufman draws from scholasticism and ontology: the distance between this world and potentiality (which she describes as a “dualist monism”), and the new figure of America (not as a land of wide open spaces and movement, but of interior immobility). Kaufman is arguing for a dualism that would break with the space and time of this world, so here she agrees with the criticisms of Deleuze made by Badiou and Hallward, but also sees this dualism as an opportunity. The virtual would not be grounded in life, and certainly not in human life, so we would avoid that always strange problem of French philosophy’s embrace of the subject and contempt for the human. This Deleuzian virtuality of inertia and cramped space would not be that of a separate substance as subject, but a virtuality that is not only not subject, but also not human, not organic, and not living; it is the “life” or power of difference that is radically other than the living, and abstract:
 

I would insist that Deleuze’s is no ordinary dualist dualism. It is more nearly a dualist monism, because it is a structural dualism and a hierarchicizing procedure used at the service of an undermining of dualism, which debatably might then form a non-Hegelian higher unity, or univocity. . . . I wish to dwell more squarely on the often static building blocks of the Deleuzian conceptual apparatus, for example the inorganic Life as an abstract entity that grounds the living, the point of immobility that grounds becoming, or the counterintuitive static part of the genesis of the actual from the virtual—in short, a bevy of stuck, dead, eternal dual structures that are more nearly categories rather than concepts.

(16)

 
Surely, today, with the pressures we humans feel with regard to life (our life, animal life, plant life, planetary life) we might imagine this third synthesis of time as a thought experiment worthy of the twenty-first century. If we could abstract from living beings, and this earthly life, and imagine a virtual power to live that was not ours, we would be brought towards an ethics without ethos, without a place or time that is ours. Then, and only then, we might start to ask not how we might survive or reinvent ourselves, but about what it is to live, and whether our living on is something that we can prefer to do, or whether (with Bartleby) we might prefer not to. If there is not just movement, dynamism, space, and becoming, but a certain inertia that is outside our time, space, and connected world of relations, then we might begin to ask about other worlds.