Wounds and Scars Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event

8/8/2019 Wounds and Scars Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event

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Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event 145

wound. Rather, Deleuze advocates a distinctively new understandingof both time and the relation between cause and effect in Logic ofSense. There the event is explicitly understood as an effect rather than acause. Without yet explicating this somewhat counter-intuitive positionthat Deleuze develops through an engagement with Stoicism, suffice itto say he intends to problematise exclusively unidirectional, empiricistunderstandings of causality. Deleuze points to reversals that interruptthe order of brute physical causality, while insisting upon the subsistenceof a more ghostly or subterranean causality obtaining on the level

of the virtual/transcendental, the quasi-cause, which also haunts andat least partly produces the actual. Quasi-causality does not function

on the basis of strict causal necessitation and determination. WhenDeleuze treats the event as synonymous with the wound, the woundis both temporal and transcendental, rather than an empirical event thathappens. For him, the event never actually happens or is present; it is

always that which has already happened, or is going to happen. As such,his manner of thinking the relation between wound and scar is not oneof empirical antecedent or spatial succession, and, unlike the Hegelianepigram with which this essay began, there is no healing or overcomingof this transcendental temporal wound, i.e., the future that is perenniallyto come, the pure past that never was.

Likewise, few twentieth-century phenomenologists would endorse

Hegels comment, albeit for reasons antithetical to Deleuze. Forthe phenomenological tradition it is more accurate to say that allhealing leaves scars. This includes the scars of historical time, whichpreclude the teleological understandings of history of both Hegel and

Marx, for whom, in different ways, the scars of the dialectic canultimately be overcome or sublated. We should also note that theattempted phenomenological reduction is itself necessarily incomplete,at least for those post-Husserlian phenomenologists who, paradoxicallyenough, provide phenomenological evidence for our inability to accessconsciousness purely and without remainder. For Heidegger, Merleau-

Ponty, and Sartre, among others, this return to the things themselvesis always partially successful and partially aborted (e.g. scarified).

Inner and outer are always co-implicated and contaminated, and someresidue of our socio-historical situatione.g. being-in-the-world or whatHeidegger calls moodis always presupposed.

In some respects, of course, Heideggers account of the priority

that Dasein must cede to the future, the not yet, presages aspectsof the poststructuralist account of time, including Deleuzes, but theimportance existentialism attributes to embodied comportment (and the


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significance of coping and the ready-to-hand for Heidegger; equilibriafor Merleau-Ponty) is also, arguably, accompanied by a priority ascribedto that which makes the world meaningful as a temporal binding

or gathering. In the canonical rejections of phenomenology profferedin Deleuzes Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense, and What isPhilosophy? (with Flix Guattari), but also in Derridas Speech andPhenomena, and, more recently, On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, themost telling and repeatedly expressed objections to phenomenology arefundamentally about time. More specifically, the objections deal with the

way in which time predominantly gathers, scarifies, or conjoins ratherthan disjoins, thanks to a tacit reliance upon an untenable conception of

the instant or now moment, as well as by the way in which lived timealmost inevitably forms a neat and unified continuum. In Difference andRepetition, Deleuze makes this explicit in his critique of a temporalitybetrothed to good and common sense (the ur-doxa), which he argues

continues to afflict phenomenology.2

I. Aion: The Event as Wound of Time

The theme of the wound is arguably one of the key aspects ofDeleuzes Logic of Sense, but in order to understand its centrality it

is first necessary to discuss a series of interrelated distinctions thatundergird this text. Deleuzes strategy is to begin with something that

seems to resemble a typical opposition, but which is soon shownto be an interrelated one, in that the terms involved cannot beconsidered complete without each other and that some kind of processof becoming obtains between them. The important concepts for ourpurposes are Aion and Chronos, surface and depth, wound and scar,event and state of affairs, and, imported from elsewhere (particularly

from Bergsonism and Difference and Repetition), the virtual and theactual. Although they are certainly not synonyms (the Aion/Chronosdistinction pertains to time, whereas surface/depth refers primarily tospace, and both are involved in the paradoxical constitution of sense),

these terms nonetheless have an isomorphism of function that mapson to the overarching distinction between the virtual and the actualwhich preoccupied Deleuze throughout his career. Schematically, thevirtual refers to that which is creative, productive and transformative(a transcendental field of difference), whereas the actual refers to thatwhich is created, produced, and of the realm of identities, sameness, andall that currently is. These distinctions also have an order of priority


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embedded within them, in that Deleuze consistently associates Aion,surface, and wound (all of which are of the order of the virtual) withthe event, or at least with the truth of the event. Aion, surface, and

wound, are also directly tied to the possibility of a new ethics, even if itis not an ethics that Deleuze himself thoroughly explicates.

In Logic of Sense there is a privilege given to surfaces over depths,as well as to that which breaks open the surface (but is nonethelessnot opposed to it), namely the crack or wound, which Deleuzeinsists does not reveal something deeper (Deleuze 2004: 11). This is

intimately bound up with the temporal priority he gives to the timeof the event, which does not occur in regular linear time, and to

the pivotal distinction he draws between Aion and Chronos.3 In theovertly Stoicist understanding of Logic of Sense, Aion is described asthe time that constantly decomposes into elongated pasts and futures,whereas Chronos is said to be composed of a series of interlocking

presents. Chronos measures temporal actualisation and the realisationof an eventits incarnation into the depths of acting bodies and itsincorporation in a state of affairs (Deleuze 2004: 73). Deleuze suggeststhat this latter time, which involves incorporation, mixtures, and depth,all figures of mediation, is the time of the scar, the realm of theactual, including bodies and states of affairs (Deleuze 2004: 10). It is,

however, the incorporeal surface, rather than the corporeal depth, that

Deleuze associates with the privileged time of Aion, which subdividesendlessly into the past and future, and the event that likewise neveractually occurs in present time. The time is never present that allowsfor an event to be realised, or to definitively exist (Deleuze 2004: 64).

On this understanding, the event is always and at the same time

something which has just happened and something which is about tohappen; never something which is happening (Deleuze 2004: 73), neveran actuality. It subsists rather than exists. Whereas Deleuze suggests thatChronos is cyclical, measures the movement of bodies and depends onthat matter which limits and fills it out, Aion is a pure straight line at thesurface, incorporeal, unlimited, an empty form of time, independent of

all matter (Deleuze 2004: 73). The time of Aion is therefore independent

of both matter and the present, which for Deleuze means that it isindependent of habit, and thus of embodied forgetting, coping, and themaintenance of equilibria that is typical of bodies and states of affairs.4

It is also independent of Reason, although that need not suggest thatit is independent of the concept, or the virtual Idea. This is a curious

and paradoxical thought, which suggests there is some kind of rupturebetween the transcendental and the empirical that refuses mediation,


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either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and hasnothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us. (Deleuze2004: 169)

Before we get to the problem of ethics, however, it is necessary tocomprehend Deleuzes repeated suggestion that events are only effects(Deleuze 2004: 10, 29, 241). How then, can an event be said tobe an effect? According to Deleuze, the reversals in Lewis Carrolls

Alice books give us some kind of indication. There, characters arepunished before having done anything wrong, or they cry before pricking

themselves (Deleuze 2004: 5). Now, there may be empirical explanationsfor such behaviour, but these are not of the order of the event. To

focus upon them would leave what he calls the expressive aspect ofthe event untouched, which does not obey the logic of anticipation,rational reconstruction, and prediction. Empirical explanations fail tosee that what has occurred is never wounding because of any particular

actuality, whatever it may be, but that we are wounded because ofthe prospect of worse to come or because of the relation that anygiven actuality bears to the complex of temporal syntheses that is ourpast, noting that this memorial past synthesises from passing moments aform that never existed before that operation (Roffe 2002). As such,it is the future and the past that wound us; that is the time of the

event. According to Deleuzeprior to the later influence of Guattari

psychoanalytic explanations were capable of understanding this andthus promised to provide the science of the event (Deleuze 2004:2423). And it is easy to see why he might have been impressed withpsychoanalysis. Despite Freuds scientific pretensions, psychoanalysisneed not require an actually occurring, actually wounding, primal scene

to which the child and adult subsequently adjust. This is partly whyKarl Popper famously calls it unfalsifiable, and, without buying into aPopperian objectivism, we will consider here the philosophical efficacy ofthe particular techniques of transcendental argumentation that Deleuzeemploys. While Deleuze calls into question the normalising tendency hefinds at the heart of psychoanalysis hence his positive discussion of the

perverse structure towards the end of Logic of Sense (Deleuze 2004:

2801, 341) for him psychoanalysis nonetheless managed to grasp theevent as an effect, and one that does not simply follow from any singlecause, or from a concatenation of actual causes constituting any givenstate of affairs.

This is because, for Deleuze, the event is subject to a double causality(a double structure), one aspect of which involves a mixture of bodiesand states of affairs (e.g. empirical causes), the other aspect being the


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configuration of different incorporeal events that are of the order ofthe quasi-cause (Deleuze 2004: 108). Psychoanalysis, too, has a doublestructure or a secret dualism at play in it, in the manner in which

the symbolic order of language is disjunct from the realm of bodies.Deleuze endorses aspects of this account in the latter stages of Logicof Sense, and his key point is that the event also results from thequasi-causal interaction of other events in the realm of the virtual,which is associated with both past and future contra Alain Badiousinterpretation which associates the virtual rather exclusively with the

past (Badiou 1999: 52; Badiou 2007: 38). The virtual relation betweendifferent incorporeal events is not a relation of causal necessity; on

the contrary, it is a relation of expression (Deleuze 2004: 194). Event-effects are said to assume amongst themselves a relation of expressionthat is quasi-causal: as such, the event haunts and subsists withoutinhabiting bodies or places. Exactly how this relation differs from

ordinary causation is not spelled out in any detail by Deleuze whosuggests that this quasi-causal relation with the virtual/transcendental isunknowable. We can know that it occurs, but we cannot trace particularchains of quasi-causation.

While Deleuze acknowledges that the event does have immediatecorporeal causes (Deleuze 2004: 10), and states of affairs do precipitate

the event, they are not sufficient causes of the event itself. Explicating

the event at the level of corporeal cause(s) and historical conditionsalways leaves something important untouched. For example, there maybe a momentous historical event (lets say May 68) brought about bycertain preconditions (economic, social, etc.) that can be fairly rigorouslydelineated, but that actual state of affairs is not commensurate with the

Event of May 68. As an effect, the event is always that which has justhappened or is about to happen, but never of the order of that whichcurrently is happening. He hence associates the event with reversalsbetween the orders of past and future, but not the present.8 The event isthus virtual, perhaps even extra-worldly. It can never come about, butproduces and conditions that which does come about. According to Peter

Hallwards provocative interpretation, this means that Deleuzes work is

not sufficiently concerned with the world and history (Hallward 2006).While such an interpretation arguably ignores the double causalityat work in the architectonic substructure of Deleuzes philosophy,Hallward is right in one important respect: the emphasis Deleuze givesto Aion over Chronos means he also prioritises the effect as quasi-cause

(the virtual) over the cause (actual) itself. There is indeed a sidelining ofordinary causality (Chronos, bodies, states of affairs, mixtures, depths,


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etc.), as Hallward complains. To put it another way, the emphasis uponcreativity and difference undergirding Deleuzes work tacitly devaluesaverage, everydayness (and thus scarification and mediation).9

II. Counter-actualisation: An Ethic of the Wound

Does this conception of the transcendental devalue ordinary causation ofboth a scientific and embodied bearing, thus resulting in an immanentlyunjustified hierarchy and a tacit ethics? To put it another way, what doesthis transcendental philosophy of time mean for the wound? Woundsare incorporeal for Deleuze and hence not part of ordinary causation:

instead, they are regularly treated as synonymous with the event. Forexample, he speaks of the Event itself, the result, the wound as eternaltruth (Deleuze 2004: 51) and asks why is every event a kind of plague,wound, war or death? (Deleuze 2004: 172), and is it the case that everyevent is of this type forest, battle and woundall the more profoundsince it occurs at the surface? (Deleuze 2004: 12). These comments arebound up with his discussion of Joe Bousquet, to whom he attributes

the Stoic maxim: my wound existed before me, I was born to embodyit (Deleuze 2004: 174). As is clear from this maxim, the wound cannotbe understood as something that accidentally and contingently befallsus. That would be to treat it as an empirical event, rather than of the

order of the virtual, the event-effect. But what might a virtual wound be?What is surreptitiously being imported into the equation by the namingof the virtual event-effect as wound and opposing that to the scarifiedrealm of bodies and their recuperation? My questions for Deleuze, then,are threefold: first, is this event-wound priority tenable? Second, can anethics be deduced from this transcendental priority? And third, whatensues (consequentially) when a transcendental and ethical priority is

given to the non-embodied, to the virtual wound that is avowedlyindependent of all matter? Does it mean that his political work runsthe risk of degenerating into an eternally patient moral perfectionism,which eschews both rational calculation as well as the basic causality ofbodies in favour of stylised prophesies and transcendental dreams of the

disruptions of the past and future?The full picture of Deleuzes ethics is rather more difficult to

grasp than is usually assumed. Frequently, we are told that his worksynthesises the respective ethics embedded in the Nietzschean andSpinozian philosophies, ethics that eschew transcendent judgment aswell as rule-based law.10 While this is at least partly true, such acharacterisation does not adequately account for the fact this immanent


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ethics cannot be understood as immanent to the actual physico-biological world, but is more aptly said to be contrary to it, or at leastcontrary to the dominant aspect of it. Indeed, it is only on seeing the

manner in which counter-actualisation (as well as associated ideas likedeterritorialisation) is bound up with the time of Aion and the virtual,that we can begin to grasp what an ethics of the event-effect might be.

While Deleuze does not offer any moral prescriptions, there is a clearnormative force at work in the distinction between Aion and Chronos.Hence his rhetorical question, is there not in the Aion a labyrinth

very different from that of Chronos a labyrinth more terrible still,which commands another eternal return and another ethic (an ethics

of Effects)? (Deleuze 2004: 72). Despite the fact that this appears tobe an open question, his invocation of another eternal return here isimportant. We know that there is both an ontological and normativeforce given to the time of the eternal return of difference in Differenceand Repetition. The eternal return of the same, however, is describedas being of only the most simplistic and introductory value (Deleuze1994: 91). Without considering the warrant for this as an interpretationof Nietzsche, something very similar is going on in Logic of Sense.11

Here Deleuze not only calls for another eternal return, but explicitlyassociates the wisdom of the actual cause with the eternal return of the

same, a moral and eternal wisdom that he denigrates (Deleuze 2004:

72). There are innumerable other comments from Deleuze that suggestthat it is an ethics of effects that he is ultimately interested in andthe more committed to. He comments, for example, that Paul Valeryhad a profound idea: what is most deep is the skin. This is a Stoicdiscovery, which presupposes a great deal of wisdom and entails an

entire ethic (Deleuze 2004: 12). We will come back to this purportedentailment, but while Deleuze proffers no prescriptive or rule-basedaccount of ethics, and while this invocation of another ethic (an ethicof Aion) does not suggest that we can simply dispense with an ethicsof Chronos and the depths (rules, rationality, causal considerations),it seems incontrovertible that there is (in Logic of Sense specifically,and arguably in Deleuzes work more generally), a definite priority

given to the ethics of Aion (an ethics of non-presentist time), which issynonymous with an ethics of the wound. This ethics is a product ofDeleuzes appropriation of the Stoic ethic of willing the event, and theinflexion that his concept of counter-actualisation gives to it.

Deleuze suggests that Stoic ethics oscillates between two poles: on theone hand, between advocating the greatest possible participation in adivine vision that gathers in depth all of the physical causes; on the other


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hand, it is also concerned with willing the event (surface), whatever itmay be, and without any interpretation or intent to integrate it withinthe unity of all physical causes (Deleuze 2004: 1634). Deleuze suggests

that the first Stoic pole is problematic because of the physicalism itpresupposes. For him, events differ in nature from the corporeal causesfrom which they are the result; they have other laws (not deductive-nomological ones) and other incorporeal forms of relation, i.e. quasi-causal and expressive (Deleuze 2004: 164). Although it is arguable thathe simply replaces the Stoic impetus towards a gathering in depth of all

physical causes with an affirmation of the univocity that obtains betweenvirtual event-effects, it must be noted that on his account, the unity of

events or effects amongst themselves is very different from the unity ofcorporeal causes amongst themselves (Deleuze 2004: 75). It is, however,the second pole of the Stoic ethic with which he is primarily concernedand which he wishes to rework for his own purposes. Accomplishing

this second aspect willing the surface event without interpretation depends pivotally upon ones relation to time, because it is not a matterof simply willing all that befalls us. That particular interpretation of

amor fati is insufficient and amounts to a form of indifferent resignationDeleuze finds ethically problematic (Deleuze 2004: 170). As John Sellarsputs it, it is a human Stoicism that tacitly remains resentful, rather than a

cosmic Stoicism that involves both affirmation and a more paradoxical

relation to time (Sellars 2006: 164). Indeed, according to Deleuze, thegenuine Stoic sage must simultaneously wait for the event as somethingeternally yet to come and always already passed (Deleuze 2004: 166).While Deleuze argues that the sage wills the actualisation of the event-

effect and the giving-body to the incorporeal effect (Deleuze 2004: 166),even then the sage ought not to will exactly what occurs, whatever itmay be, but something within that which occurs (Deleuze 2004: 170).

Bousquet offers as an example of what this might involve. As Sellarscomments, the task for Bousquet was to transform the event of thewound from a tragic external assault that afflicted him into a vital and

necessary event in his life that made it possible for him to discoverhimself as a writer, to become who he already was (Sellars 2006: 161).

We can conclude from this that despising any particular wounding-eventis a form of ressentiment, as, to a lesser extent, is the traditional Stoicethic of expecting suffering and misfortune but soldiering on. Both makea transcendental mistake when they treat the wound empirically. On the

other hand, embracing the event and the transformations it inducesnot its brute actuality is amor fati. This is the rather stark alternativeDeleuze seems to leave us with, and he goes on to encourage us to


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become the offspring of ones events, not of ones actions. One mustbecome the offspring of the virtual intensities that subsist in oneself,which is another way of saying that one must express the wound and

make it the quasi-cause of ones life. Now this cannot mean to becomethe offspring of ones emotions or passions, or even to intensify onesemotions and passions. After all, emotions are, for Deleuze, boundto a subject, and considered to be of the order of a state of affairsrather than of the order of the event (Deleuze 2004: 7). It is difficultto pinpoint positively what his ethics might involve, but it seems to

require the recognition that we are all traversed by some kind offault-line (a virtual, impersonal intensity) that is supra-individual and

not confined to the realms of bodies and states of affairs. Whetherthis faultline or wound can be distinctive for each of us or ultimatelypartakes in one transcendental wound is not clear, but it is the conceptof counter-actualisation that he uses to more fully describe what is

involved in the appropriate manner of giving body to an incorporealevent-effect.

In describing his ethic of counter-actualisation, Deleuze suggests thateach time the event is inscribed in the flesh, we must double thispainful actualisation by a counter-actualisation which limits, movesand transfigures it (Deleuze 2004: 182). Inscribing the event in the

flesh (in the realm of bodies and habits) is hence necessary for

the sage and for ethics, but it is not the key aspect of his ethic(Deleuze 2004: 192). Rather, it is the potentialities of that actuality thatare expressed, not merely the literal re-inscription of the same (Williams1997: 23246). Not pathological repetition, then, but repetition with

a difference. Counter-actualisation must limit, move, transfigure andmime that which effectively occurs. While the event is brought about bythe living present, by bodies, states of affairs and reason, its eternal truthis irreducible to them (Deleuze 2004: 182). The event may be the result ofthe actions and passion of bodies, but his ethics affirms its irreducibilityto these origins, done by linking it to a transcendental quasi-cause

(wound, Aion, virtual, etc.) rather than to the empirical cause (Deleuze2004: 109). This is an ethics of the mime and of acting. Sensations and

intensities can be extended beyond the singular through the expressiveand dramatic practices of counter-actualisation. For Deleuze, it is thefree man, who grasps the event, and does not allow it to be actualisedas such without enacting, the actor, its counter-actualisation (Deleuze

2004: 173). This counter-actualisation involves a delicate operation, inthat we need to limit ourselves to the counter-actualisation of an event(and thus embrace our wounding virtual-effect) without allowing the full


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actualisation of this wound that characterises the victim and the patient(Deleuze 2004: 179).

For Deleuze and Bousquet alike, the wound exists before us, before

any particular subject or individuality, and yet we are born to embodyit, thus becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us(Deleuze 2004: 169). Again, it is difficult to understand precisely whatthis means, but we know what it does not mean. We should not beindifferently resigned to whatever happens to us, as in the commonlyreceived understanding of Stoicism, and it is also important to note

Deleuzes second and inverse warning: counter-actualisation is nothing,it belongs to a buffoon when it operates alone and pretends to have

the value of what could have happened. But to be the mime ofwhat effectively occurs ...is to give the truth of the event the onlychance of not being confused with its inevitable actualisation (Deleuze2004: 182). There are then, two main ways of misunderstanding

and mistakenly living his ethics of counter-actualisation: assentingto whatever actually happens indifferently and with resignation, orflippantly miming other possibilities that bear no effective relation towhat happens. No prescription can tell us how to accomplish this, butwe can see that counter-actualisation endeavours to achieve that mostparadoxical of things: to express and even illicitly embody the virtual,

to feel that time-which-is-not. If the present (Chronos) measures the

temporal realisation of an event, and the way in which the wound iscovered over and incorporated into a state of affairs (Deleuze 2004:73), counter-actualisation depends upon maintaining a relation to timethat opens itself to the immemorial past (that past that defies conscious

memorial reconstruction) and the future that is to come, a time thatretreats and advances, divides endlessly into a proximate past and animminent future. This is the time of Aion, the wound.

How can an ethics be based on time, and on the aspect of an event thatnever actually occurs but is understood as something within that whichoccurs, and which is also said to be both always already passed and

yet to come? In one respect Deleuze is simply following in the footstepsof Nietzsche. What Nietzsche diagnoses as ressentiment (disgust for life

that trades in negativity) is a revenge against the fact that time passes.The major form of this ressentiment results from artificially delimitingtime and insisting upon the priority of the present. From the perspectiveof some particular present, we might rail against suffering and injustices,

whether they be anticipated or endured. The problem with this attitude,however, is that it treats the wound-event as somehow wholly outside ofus. This is the reverse of what Deleuzian counter-actualisation aims to


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achieve. It wants the wound to give birth to us, but not to be the sameas us. Deleuze insists that there is no other ill-will than ressentiment ofthe event, and, given that we also know that for him the truth of the

event is Aion (Deleuze 2004: 166, 182), we can conclude that there is noother ill-will than ressentiment of Aion. For counter-actualisation to besuccessful, although it cannot simply return to the virtual, it must bothshow the manner in which the virtual and the time of Aion breathe lifeinto that which occurs, as well as simultaneously allow this to happen.This is the tension between the is and the ought, the descriptiveand the normative that Deleuzes philosophy negotiates and sometimes

conflates. What does that mean for the role of the present, for Chronos,

for bodies, states of affairs (including empirical wounds and suffering),and even for Reason, which Deleuze also suggests is a being of thepresent? (Deleuze 2004: 74). They are all insufficient for an ethics, andhis point is not merely that some kind of dialectical relation with an

ethics of Aion needs to be recognised, in order to balance or moderatethe monopoly that an ethics of Chronos has hitherto enjoyed. Rather,his point is once again both transcendental and normative: the time ofAion and the virtual are the condition for the event, and from them healso derives what is arguably the governing normative principle of hiswork: counter-actualisation.

The important question then becomes the following: can a

transcendental condition also entail a normative principle, even oneas opaque as this ethic of counter-actualisation? For Deleuze, thetranscendental needs to provide the conditions for real experience. Ifwe grant for a moment that his philosophy accomplishes this in itsdescriptions of the molecular, difference-in-itself, the virtual, the Aionic

aspect of time, etc., in what sense does an ethics of counter-actualisationfollow from this? It is not clear that it does. Nor is it clear why Aionand the truth of the event need to be understood as independent ofall matter. One would have thought that the transcendental condition,the realm of the virtual, is never wholly independent of matter; indeed,by Deleuzes own lights (as evinced by the concept of reciprocal

determination in Difference and Repetition), it is not.12 Does this

independence of matter, this secret dualism ofLogic of Sense, whereinAion and the event are privileged, simply reproduce itself at a morallevel, with a moral hierarchy? It seems to me that it does. If so, thisis philosophically problematic in itself, but there are also reasons toquestion this ethic in its own right. Because it parallels the movement of

the quasi-cause and is associated with the virtual, an ethics of counter-actualisation necessarily resists the imposition of any form of criteria.


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As such, using this ethics to discriminate between different modes ofexistence is exceedingly difficult. While this problem is partly overcomein other of Deleuzes texts, especially those on Spinoza and Nietzsche,

this ethic also (illegitimately, in my view) consigns coping, equilibria, andthe body of depths, to a secondary status. This is problematic becauseit is aristocratic (Mengue 2003), which is also, perhaps, another way ofsaying, extra-worldly (Hallward 2006). This is a strange and counter-intuitive consequence for a philosophy of immanence, and it seems tome that it arises from competing tendencies in Deleuzes work that are

never satisfactorily resolved: that is, his post-Kantian philosophy of timeand the transcendental (which intercedes intermittently in his ethics), and

his pre-Kantian ethics of immanence (which is also ontological), whichshould theoretically do away with the hierarchies that his transcendentalphilosophy of time tacitly depends upon.

III. Reflections on the Broader Deleuzian Oeuvre

Although these aspects of Deleuzes workthe transcendental prioritygiven to Aion, the virtual, and a resultant ethicsare foregrounded ina distinctive way in Logic of Sense, similar positions prevail in the verydifferent idioms of Difference and Repetition, What is Philosophy? and

Bergsonism.In Logic of Sense, the incorporeal wound is the wound of time,but not of all time understood as some kind of whole; rather, it isthe wound of a particular disjunctive aspect of time Aion ratherthan Chronos. More particularly, Aion is composed of a simultaneousmovement in two directions, opening upon both the future and the past.In the terms of Difference and Repetition, Aion hence encompasses twodifferent temporal syntheses, memorial and futural, and in Differenceand Repetition it is only the latter of the two which Deleuze explicitlyunderstands as caesura (Deleuze 1994: 89, 92). It is the futural synthesisof time (the caesura) that fractures the I and which Deleuze suggestsmust be determined in the image of a unique and tremendous event

(Deleuze 1994: 89). This futural time, exemplified for him by theidea of the eternal return of difference, simultaneously conditions andundermines both habitual and memorial time, and cannot itself bereduced to its corporeal conditions (Deleuze 1994: 901). While it is awound that refuses mediation, Deleuze nonetheless implies that we canstill, somehow, live this time, if only we could become good throwersof the dice, embracing both chance and necessity in the manner that


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Nietzsches philosophy of the eternal return of difference is said toteach us.

In order to understand the priority Deleuze gives to the future

synthesis of time in Difference and Repetition, it is worth reflecting onwhat Deleuze has to say about Pguy and Kierkegaard. Both of them aredescribed by Deleuze as great philosophers of repetition, yet he suggeststhat they were not ready to pay the necessary price and embrace thisradical futural wound. For him, they entrusted this supreme repetition,repetition as a category of the future, to faith . . . However, faith invites

us to rediscover once and for all God and the self in a commonresurrection . . . they realise Kantianism by entrusting to faith the task

of overcoming the speculative death of God and healing the woundin the self (Deleuze 1994: 95). In other words, his objection to theirphilosophies of repetition is that they heal this temporal wound, coverit over, in a very different manner to their predecessor Hegel but with

the same result nonetheless. With Nietzsches death of god and thewars of the twentieth century, however, things have changed on thephilosophical scene. Indeed, I have contended that with post-Husserlianphenomenology the healing is never complete and perfect but alwaysscarificatory.13 As such, phenomenology can plausibly be characterisedas tacitly presupposing an ethic of scars (coping),14 a phronesis that

mediates, or a wisdom that searches for the middle (Gallagher 1993:

298305), and therefore it constitutes a philosophy of common-sense.15

But the important question is whether common-sense is automaticallyworthy of condemnation and warranting replacement with becoming alittle alcoholic, a little crazy . . . just enough to extend the crack (Deleuze2004: 179), worthy, that is, of Deleuzes conviction that health alone

does not suffice (Deleuze 2004: 182). Clearly I remain unconvinced byDeleuzes answers in this regard, at least insofar as there is an ethicalprivilege granted to the crack (wound), madness, and the virtual event-effect. But based on the above we might risk the following epochalformulation: time, Geist, and history heal all wounds for Hegel; Godheals the temporal wound for Peguy and Kierkegaard; for the post-

Husserlian phenomenologists time imperfectly scars; and with post-

phenomenology (in particular Deleuze and Derrida) it is the woundof time itself that is revalued in a transcendental move that tacitlydiminishes the scar.

Against a certain postmodern reception of Deleuze as a philosopherof the body, there is a sense in which this transcendental move

also diminishes the actions and passions of bodies. Although allactualisations necessarily involve creativity and transformation for


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Deleuze, it is nonetheless the case that the force for this changecomes from the virtual, Aion, the time which is not. In this respect,Deleuzes transcendental philosophy of time, and his associated ethics,

subtly disparage the imperfect corporeal scarification and mediationthat is always already at work.16 To see how this is so, it is worthbriefly considering Deleuzes detailed treatment of the virtual/actualdistinction in Bergsonism. Deleuze directly confronts the question ofwhether Bergsons position amounts to a dualism or a monism, andin describing Bergsons methodological strategy of division he also

makes an observation that seems to bear crucially upon his own modusoperandi. Deleuze states that:

[T]here is some resemblance between intuition as a method of division and

transcendental analysis. If the composite represents the fact, it must be divided

into tendencies or into pure presences that only exist in principle . . . We go

beyond experience to the conditions of experience. (Deleuze 1988: 23)

Deleuze adds:

By dividing the composite according to two tendencies, with only one

showing the way a thing varies qualitatively in time, Bergson effectively gives

himself the means of choosing the right side in each case; that of the

essence. (Deleuze 1988: 32)

According to Deleuze, this does not depend on arbitrary inspiration, but

it is unclear how this might be so without a vicious circularity, e.g.picking the qualitative over the quantitative as Badiou (1999: 245)suggests. More to the point, however, might we also conclude thatthis is the manner in which Deleuzes own work proceeds, given thatDeleuze himself suggests the comparison between Bergsons method andhis own transcendental analyses? Indeed, we have seen that the various

oppositions that concern Deleuze ultimately involve a hierarchy of sorts,in which one term (i.e. those associated with the virtual, including Aion,surface, the event, etc.) is the transcendental condition of the other (i.e.those associated with the actual, including Chronos, depths, states of

affairs), and the former also has an ethical impetus associated with it.There is an axiomatic preference for the virtual over the actual (in botha transcendental and ethical sense) and for counter-actualisation overactualisation. These discriminations only make sense insofar as a secretdualism persists in his evaluative scheme, even if it may ultimatelybe a part of an ontological monism as the doctrine of univocitysuggests.


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160 Jack Reynolds

Indeed, despite Deleuze following Bergson in certain respects andintermittently offering an account of actualisation as being necessarilycreative and transformative (e.g. evolution), it is also worth considering

his account of the prototype of counter-actualisation as it appears inBergsonism. In this intriguing text, Deleuze spends some time detailingfour aspects of actualisation: what he calls, translation and rotation,which form the properly psychic moments; dynamic movement, theattitude of the body that is necessary to the stable equilibrium of the twopreceding determinations; and finally mechanical movement, the motor

scheme that represents the final stage of actualisation . . . the adaptationof the past to the present (Deleuze 1988: 70). Despite the attention given

to these psychic and sensory processes of actualisation, the metaphorof mechanism here again betrays Deleuzes view of habit as beingtoo closely aligned to mere bare repetition and of the order of themerely empirical. These processes of actualisation are understood as akin

to brute nature, and need to be supplemented by another process, aninorganic or orgiastic one. Indeed, Deleuze adds a fifth element whichradically differs in kind from these first four, and which he describesin almost precisely the same terms as what in Logic of Sense he callscounter-actualisation: a kind of displacement by which the past isembodied only in terms of a present that is different from that which it

has been (Deleuze 1988: 71). As we have seen, this counter-actualisation

that partakes of the virtual, although it is embodied, owes its value tothat in it which is not embodied. As such, the virtual retains an ethicalpriority over mere mechanism, and the great souls, artists and mystics,manage to embody this virtuality in its purest form (Deleuze 1988: 112).However, this religious and mystical aspect to the last few pages of

Bergsonism is not entirely a reflection of Bergsons philosophy: it alsoreflects Deleuzes own enduring, if sometimes undisclosed, commitmentto a secret dualism.17

Some of these tendencies are also apparent in What is Philosophy?,where Deleuze and Guattari recapitulate many of these ideas regardingthe virtual and the actual, and the motif of the wound and the scar also

return. For example, Deleuze and Guattari suggest it is the conceptual

personae who counter-effectuates events, who wills war against pastand future wars, who wills the wound against all scars (Deleuze andGuattari 1994: 160). Moreover, in redescribing the virtual and actualdistinction, they also suggest:

[F]rom everything that a subject may live, from its own body, from

other bodies and objects distinct from it, and from the state of affairs or


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physico-mathematical field that determines them, the event releases a vapour

that does not resemble them and that takes the battlefield, the battle, and the

wound as components or variations of a pure event. (Deleuze and Guattari

1994: 159)18

As such, Deleuze and Guattari reaffirm that the event is actualised or

effectuated when inserted into a state of affairs, but counter-actualised orcounter-effectuated when abstracted from states of affairs so as to isolateits concept. Hence there is still a sense in which one needs to disembodyoneself from states of affairs and extract oneself from a lived situation(both of which are treated as ordered and monotonous) in order to

embody the incorporeal event and to experience the counter-forces thatmight have been, and, in a certain paradoxical sense, nonetheless stillare. While the point is arguably not to take oneself out of this world,as in the title of Hallwards recent book, but rather to live the eventin the world (noting that world must be understood in an expandedand non-empirical sense) in a way other than the way in which it firstpresents itself, the spirit of the injunction is nonetheless to be true to

the aspect of the wound (event) that does not and cannot appear in theworld.

Now it might be protested that Deleuzes indebtedness to empiricismand his sustained discussions of habit complicate this claim that he

marginalises the actual, bodies, scars, etc., and in a certain sense theydo. For him, habit is fundamental to the constitution of subjectivity. This

is clear as early as Empiricism and Subjectivity, and also in Differenceand Repetition. His analyses are highly acute in this regard, but it isimportant to recognise that habit is nonetheless the lesser (ontologically)of the three syntheses of time he describes in chapter two of Differenceand Repetition. While in both an empirical and logical sense therecannot, for Deleuze, be a subject without habit, it is the motif of binding

that dominates his descriptions of this synthesis of time. We must notethat in the context of his discussion of the three syntheses of time,Deleuze says of the habitual synthesis that a scar is the sign not ofa past wound but of the present fact of having been wounded: we

can say that it is the contemplation of the wound, that it contracts allthe instants which separate us from it into a living present (Deleuze1994: 77). This suggests that the condition of habitual time is the wound(futural time, difference-in-itself). However, this transcendental privilegealso becomes an ethical one when Deleuze insists on the importance ofthe time of apprenticeship and the way it never leaves us and is neverfully mastered (Deleuze 1994: 25). His overarching ethic is hence not


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162 Jack Reynolds

one of phronesis, of practical wisdom within a given embodied andcultural context. If an ethics of phronesis can be seen tacitly at work inmost phenomenology, with its communitarian inclinations, this is clearly

not the case for Deleuze. On the contrary, it is an ethic of jolting thisworld (of time out of joint), and of disturbing the equanimity of theexperiences of wisdom and mastery.

In regard to the ongoing question of Deleuzes secret dualism andthe relationship that obtains between the transcendental (virtual) and theactual, it is worth noting that even in Difference and Repetition there issaid to be a vast difference between material and spiritual repetition(Deleuze 1994: 84), between the actual and the virtual. Even though the

transcendental (virtual) is not fixed but fluid, and in an asymmetricalrelation of reciprocal determination with the actual, it nonethelessretains a priority (via the quasi-cause, via counter-actualisation) overthe body and states of affairs. It is an epiphenomenal and temporal

wound that not only has a philosophical order of priority, but alsoan ethical one. As such, his work constitutes an ethics of the virtual,or an ethics of the event-effect. Grasping this depends upon seeing thesignificance of his philosophy of time and its anti-presentism, alongwith the wound that time opens up both individually and virtually. Hisethical principles derive from a hierarchical transcendental philosophy

that gives to the body the lesser role: even when Deleuze talks of

sensations they come from the virtual and the surface more than fromthe realm of bodies and depths. If one thinks this characterisation istoo swift given his Spinozian declarations that we do not yet knowwhat a body can do, it must be noted, again, that such transformations

can and must come from outside the body, from something akin tothe virtual (Deleuze 1990: 226). Despite the profound excavationsthat his work exerts upon the Cartesian mind, the philosophy of thesubject, and the philosophy of representation, Deleuzes philosophynonetheless reinvents a strange amalgam of the modern and the pre-modern, reinventing a form of dualism that is uniquely his own. No

doubt that is a major accomplishment understood in terms of thecreation of concepts, but it is also one that deserves to have these and

other critical questions put to it.

References

Badiou, Alain (1999) Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, trans. Louise Burchill,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Badiou, Alain (2007) The Event in Deleuze, trans. Jon Roffe, Parrhesia: A Journalof Critical Philosophy, 2, pp. 3744.


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Buchanan, Ian (2000) Deleuzism: A Metacommentary, Durham: Duke UniversityPress.

Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam,New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, Gilles (1990) Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin,New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, Gilles (1991) Empiricism and Subjectivity, trans. Constantin Boundas,New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (2001) Pure Immanence, ed. John Rajchman, trans. Anne Boyman,New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, Gilles (2004) Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, London: Continuum.Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Flix (1994) What is Philosophy? trans. HughTomlinson and Graham Burchell, London: Verso.

Gallagher, Shaun (1993) The Place of Phronesis in Postmodern Hermeneutics,Philosophy Today, 37, pp. 298305.

Grosz, Elizabeth (2004) The Nick of Time, Sydney: Allen and Unwin.Hallward, Peter (2006) Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation,

London: Verso.Hegel, G. W. (1979) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, J. N. Findlay,

Oxford: Oxford University Press.Heidegger, Martin (2004) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and

E. Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell.May, Todd (1999) Reconsidering Difference, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State

University Press.May, Todd (2005) Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Mengue, Philippe (2003) Deleuze et la question de la democratie, Paris:

LHarmattan.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1994) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith,

London: Routledge.Negri, Antonio (2005) Time for Revolution, trans. Michael Mandrini, London:

Continuum.Nietzsche, Friedrich (2001) The Gay Science, ed. Williams, trans. Nauckhoff and

Del Caro, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Reynolds, Jack (2006) Deleuze and Dreyfus on lhabitude, Coping and Trauma

in Skill Acquisition, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 14:4,pp. 56383.

Reynolds, Jack (2008) Deleuzes Other-Structure: Beyond the Master-Slave Dialecticbut at what cost?, Symposium.

Reynolds, Jack and Roffe, Jon (2006) Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence,

Univocity, and Phenomenology, Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology,37:3, pp. 22851.

Roffe, Jon (2002) Deleuze, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, James Fieser andBrad Dowden (eds), http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/deleuze.htm.

Sellars, John (2006) An Ethics of the Event: Deleuzes Stoicism, Angelaki: Journalof the Theoretical Humanities, 2:3, pp. 15771.

Smith, Daniel (2003) Mathematic and the Theory of Multiplicities: Badiou andDeleuze Revisited, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 41:3, pp. 41149.


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Smith, Daniel (2007) Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Towards anImmanent Theory of Ethics, Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, 2,pp. 6678.

Williams, James (1997) Deleuze and J.M.W. Turner: Catastrophism in Philosophyin, Keith Ansell-Pearson (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer,London: Routledge, pp. 23246.

Williams, James (2003) A Critical Introduction to Gilles Deleuzes Difference andRepetition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Williams, James (2005) Deleuze and Whitehead: The Concept of ReciprocalDetermination in Cloots, A., and Robinson, K., Brussels (eds) Deleuze, Whiteheadand the Transformation of Metaphysics, Brussels: Konklijke Vlaamse AcademieVan Belgie Voor Wetenschaapen En Kusten, pp. 89105.

Williams, James (2006) The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze: Encounters andInfluences, Manchester: Clinamen.

Notes

1. This essay has benefited from the assistance of Jon Roffe, the Deleuze Studiesreferees and editorial team, and the Australian Research Council.

2. Cf. Reynolds and Roffe 2006.3. These terms are also used in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:

262).4. Cf. Hallward 2006.5. This is not to dispute his famously opaque concept of transcendental empiricism,

found largely in Difference and Repetition, which purports to allow one todiscern the conditions for actual rather than merely possible experience. Thereis clearly a relation between the orders of the virtual and the actual, as well assomething about each that necessarily resists the other. My main concern in this

paper, however, is with the manner in which a dualist evaluative scheme makespossible his ethics. On this interpretation, transcendental empiricism is reallyan attempt to foreground the significance of the virtual and the transcendental(and their expressive quasi-causality) so that we dont have an all-encompassingrealm of brute empiricism/physicalism, which Deleuze refers to as involvingmerely bare repetition.

6. Cf. Williams 2006.7. In Out of this World, Peter Hallward suggests that they ultimately conflate into a

monistic univocity, precisely because what I label the transcendental componentof the distinction, that which does not refer to lactualite, is in fact ultimatelyall that there is. Deleuze, however, consistently speaks of a secret dualism inLogic of Sense, with, as we have seen, the body and states of affairs the lesser butarguably not entirely effaced term of the dualism. I return to this question below,but it revolves around the extent to which Deleuze is read as a Bergsonian, sincefor Bergson, at least on Deleuzes account, we might understand the actual as

but a tendency of the virtual. Hallward and Alain Badiou interpret Deleuzeand Bergsons positions as very closely related, but it needs to be noted thatDeleuzes understanding of the virtual is not exactly synonymous with Bergsons Bergsons conception focuses upon the past and memory, but Deleuze adds acomplicated account of the futural synthesis of time to the equation, especiallyin Difference and Repetition.

8. He complicates this account towards the end ofLogic of Sense in the series titledAion, where he details the different modalities of the present and instant thatare characteristic of Aion and Chronos. Adequately addressing this material,


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ethics is one of the inorganic. Second, to the extent that the nomad/royalscience distinction Smith is concerned with maps onto the distinctions discussedhere, both Deleuze and Smith prioritise differentiation (problems, virtual) overdifferenciation (dynamisms, actual solutions) and hence nothing necessarilycontravenes my account. While the impetus behind such a prioritisation isarguably the hope of somehow reinvigorating the actual, it is again the casethat the ethical imperative for this derives from the fundamental hierarchicaldifferentiation of the virtual and the actual.

17. Deleuze (1988: 105) also accepts the preferability of a finalism in whichthe living being is somehow non-analogically compared to the whole of theuniverse. But perhaps the clearest example of this mysticism in Deleuzes work,however, occurs in his essay Michel Tournier and the World Without Others,an appendix to Logic of Sense, but written much earlier. I analyse this intriguingessay in Reynolds 2008.

18. Some similar observations regarding the wound also feature in Pure Immanence:The wound is incarnated or actualised in a state of things or in lived experience:but it is itself a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence (Deleuze 2001: 31).Establishing precisely what the relationship is between the virtual and the planeof immanence is, however, beyond me here.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224108000056

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Wounds and Scars Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event