181
[Corry Shores, “Body and World in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze,” Studia Phaenomenologica
XII (2012): 181–209.
This is a pre-publication draft that has been repaginated to match that of the print version.]
Body and World in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze 1
Corry Shores
University of Leuven
Abstract: To compare Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s phenomenal bodies, I first
examine how for Merleau-Ponty phenomena appear on the basis of three levels of
integration: 1) between the parts of the world, 2) between the parts of the body,
and 3) between the body and its world. I contest that Deleuze’s attacks on
phenomenology can be seen as constructive critiques rather than as being
expressions of an anti-phenomenological position. By building from Deleuze’s
definition of the phenomenon and from his more phenomenologically relevant
writings, we find that phenomena for him are given to the body under exactly the
opposite conditions as for Merleau-Ponty, namely that 1) the world’s differences
2) appear to a disordered body that 3) comes into shocking affective contact with
its surroundings. I argue that a Deleuzian theory of bodily-given phenomena is
better suited than Merleau-Ponty’s model in the task of accounting for the
intensity of phenomenal appearings.
Keywords: Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, Body, World
1. Introduction
As Joe Hughes observes, there is “not much consensus in the current critical literature
when it comes to the question of Deleuze’s relationship to phenomenology.” 2 On the one
hand, Deleuze is often explicitly critical of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and phenomenology in
general, and many commentators have regarded those critiques as expressing an antiphenomenological tendency in Deleuze’s thinking. 3 Other scholars acknowledge the tensions
1
May I thank Roland Breeur, Ullrich Melle, and Nicolas de Warren of the Husserl Archives in Leuven for their
contributions to this paper.
2
J. Hughes, Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, London: Continuum, 2008, p. 3.
3
See, for example, M. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in D. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, English trans. by D. Bouchard and S. Simon, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1977, pp. 165–196; L. Lawlor, “The End of Phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and
Merleau-Ponty,” Continental Philosophy Review 31.1 (1998), pp. 15–34; D. Olkowski, Deleuze and the Ruin of
Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; L. Lawlor, Thinking through French
Philosophy: The Being of the Question, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003; D. Olkowski, “Philosophy
of Structure, Philosophy of Event: Deleuze’s Critique of Phenomenology,” Chiasmi International 13 (2011), pp.
193–216; and P. Montebello, “Deleuze, une anti-phénoménologie?” Chiasmi International 13 (2011), pp. 315–
325.
182
between Deleuze and phenomenology while also recognizing fundamental compatibilities, as
well as the ways that Deleuze’s critiques fail to grasp the ambiguities and later development
of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. 4 Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that Deleuze’s
ideas can be seen as a radicalization of phenomenology. 5 According to Alain Beaulieu,
Deleuze thrived on his conflictual relation with phenomenology. For Deleuze,
phenomenology is an enemy of sorts that benefited him like a friend, because it helped him
advance his own ideas. 6 Our analysis here, however, is interested not so much in what was the
relationship of Deleuze’s ideas to phenomenology, but more in what it could become when we
treat his criticisms as constructive critiques. Might it be possible to do phenomenology in a
Deleuzean way? Miguel de Beistegui writes:
Has phenomenology not characterized itself throughout precisely as this ability to become and
evolve? And is this not the historical lesson of phenomenology: that it is itself a flow, with
unpredictable bends and meanderings, which, whatever their intensity, in the end always
reinvent phenomenology […]. […] there is no “letter” of phenomenology: no primordial word,
no consecrated text, no originary truth that one could betray: only an endless series of heresies,
which is, at least in philosophy, the only possible form of fidelity, that is, the fidelity in and
through genuine questioning. 7
We will place Deleuze’s philosophy of the body without organs, then, in stark contrast to
Merleau-Ponty’s integrationist model to show that Deleuze’s
4
See, for example, C. Boundas, “Translator’s Introduction: Deleuze, Empiricism, and the Struggle for
Subjectivity,” in G. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature,
English trans. by C. Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, pp. 1–19; J. Reynolds and J. Roffe,
“Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology,” Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology 37.3 (2006), pp. 229–251; H. Somers-Hall, “Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics of
Difference,” in C. Boundas (ed.), Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction, London: Continuum, 2009, pp. 123–130; J.
Hughes, op. cit.; J. Wambacq, “Depth and Time in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze,” Chiasmi International 13
(2011), pp. 327–348; J. Wambacq, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze as Interpreters of Henri
Bergson,” in A. Tymieniecka (ed.), Transcendentalism Overturned: From Absolute Power of Consciousness
until the Forces of Cosmic Architectonics (Analecta Husserliana 108), Dordrecht: Springer, 2011, pp. 269–284;
and J. Wambacq, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Criticism on Bergson’s Theory of Time Seen Through the Work of
Gilles Deleuze,” Studia Phaenomenologica 11 (2011), pp. 309–325.
5
See, for example, C. Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, London: Routledge, 2002; L. Bryant, Difference and
Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2008.
6
A. Beaulieu, Gilles Deleuze et la phénoménologie, Mons: Sils Maria, 2004.
7
M. Beistegui, “Toward a Phenomenology of Difference?” Research in Phenomenology 30 (2000), p. 68.
183
conception is better suited for explaining the intensities of phenomena. To do this, we first
examine how phenomena appear to Merleau-Ponty on account of three coordinated levels of
integrations, namely, the integration between the parts of the world, the integration of our
body parts, and our body’s integration within its phenomenal world. Then parallel to each
level we find contrary principles in our Deleuzian theory of the phenomenological body: for
Deleuze, phenomena would appear when our body, whose parts are working disjunctively,
detects incompatible differences in a surrounding world that is split off from it during a
shocking encounter.
2. Phenomenal Integration
For Merleau-Ponty we never perceive qualities or other parts of perception purely in
themselves, but rather only in their integrated relation with other qualities or parts. He has us
imagine a white patch on a homogeneous background. No matter what we are looking at,
there will always be something surrounding it. If in our example we are looking in the middle
at a particular point, we thereby sense it belonging together among its neighboring parts, with
all these points belonging to the whole patch. Or if we see a part of the patch at the boundary,
we also thereby sense it belonging with the neighboring parts of the patch but not with the
adjacent points outside it in the background. 8 So already we see there is no such thing as a
purely atomic perception. In fact, all the nearby qualities are influencing the way any part of
something looks:
This red patch which I see on the carpet is red only in virtue of a shadow which lies across it, its
quality is apparent only in relation to the play of light upon it, and hence as an element in a
spatial configuration. Moreover the colour can be said to be there only if it occupies an area of a
certain size, too small an area not being describable in these terms. 9
We are also misled into thinking that there is a “point-by-point” constant correspondence
between the parts of what we see and the parts of our “elementary perception.” 10 Certain
optical illusions disprove this thesis.
Fig. 1 One part of the Müller-Lyer illusion
8
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard, 1945, p. 9; Phenomenology of
Perception, English trans. by C. Smith, London: Routledge, 1962, pp. 3–4. Henceforth abbreviated as PP, with
French/English page numbers.
9
PP, p. 10/4.
10
PP, p. 14/7.
184
Consider for example the above portion of the Müller-Lyer optical illusion [figure 1]. We see
two equal lines. Now, view the remaining pieces [figure 2].
Fig. 2 Another part of the Müller-Lyer illusion
When we put them together [figure 3], we do not see them combined into two equal lines with
inverted arrow-ends.
Fig. 3 Müller-Lyer illusion
Rather, the horizontal lines now appear as bearing different lengths, on account of their
integrated relations with the angled pieces. Hence, what we sense is not the immediate effect
of the parts making one-to-one impressions on us:
normal functioning must be understood as a process of integration in which the text of the
external world is not so much copied as composed. And if we try to seize ‘sensation’ within the
perspective of the bodily phenomena which pave the way to it, we find […] a formation already
bound up with a larger whole […]. […] the perceived, by its nature, admits of the ambiguous,
the shifting, and is shaped by its context. 11
The integration of phenomenal parts has for Merleau-Ponty a certain phenomenological
structure, namely, the horizonal structure of our intentional awareness. The red of the stain on
the carpet has its particular look on account of the other qualities and objects expressing
themselves in that appearance, for example, the overlaying shadow that tinges the color. So
when we see the red, our minds are also made aware of the blanket of shade covering the area,
even if we are not explicitly aware of it. We will not be surprised when we look up and see
something blocking the light source. The red’s particular shaded look refers our mind to
something not explicit in the perception. Our minds have an awareness of it, but it is not in the
forefront of our attention. As an implied phenomenon, it hovers at the edges of our awareness,
which could literally be the perimeter of our field of vision or just be a vague, indeterminate,
and
11
PP, pp. 16/9, 18/11.
185
ambiguous part of our intentional consciousness, residing in the background of what our
minds are currently attending to. It looms on the “horizon” of our awareness. To see red, then,
means that this red
announces something else which it does not include, that it exercises a cognitive function, and
that its parts together make up a whole to which each is related without leaving its place.
Henceforth the red is no longer merely there, it represents something for me, and what it
represents is not possessed as a ‘real part’ of my perception, but only aimed at as an ‘intentional
part’. 12
Because each elementary part of our perception “arouses the expectation of more than it
contains,” it is “therefore already charged with a meaning”; 13 it is already indicating or
suggesting some other phenomenon.
In fact, this horizonal integration of phenomenal objects is so involved that to see one
object from a given perspective is also to have on the horizon of our awareness the way that
object looks from the perspectives of every other object facing it. Merleau-Ponty illustrates
this effectively with the arm-shadow in Rembrandt’s De Nachtwacht [figure 4]. 14
Fig. 4 Rembrandt’s De Nachtwacht (The Night Watch) 15
12
PP, p. 20/13.
PP, p. 9/4.
14
M. Merleau-Ponty, “L’œil et l’esprit,” in C. Lefort (ed.), Œuvres, Paris: Gallimard, 2010, p. 1599; “Eye and
Mind,” English trans. by C. Dallery, in J. M. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, p. 167. Henceforth abbreviated as OE, with French/English page numbers.
15
This image and the following details: Rembrandt, De Nachtwacht, Wikimedia Commons,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_nightwatch_large.jpg, accessed 14-Dec-2011.
13
186
Notice how the man in the foreground holds out his arm, which casts a shadow on the man
standing next to him [figures 5 and 6].
Figs. 5 and 6 Details from Rembrandt’s De Nachtwacht
We do not merely see his arm from just our perspective; we also see it as if we were looking
from his right side at the angle of the light source, because the shadow we see from our
perspective presents to us the appearance of his arm from the sun’s perspective.
This illustration will help us grasp the sort of panoptic vision we have even from our
glance at one viewpoint. Consider also when we stand between a set of railroad tracks and
look down their straight extent into the distance. They seem to converge very far off. But this
tells us they must be still parallel all the way in the distance, because they would instead
appear parallel from here only if they continually diverged as they progressed. In a way,
seeing the convergence is to indirectly stand far down the tracks and view them being
parallel. 16 Yet, this means we are implicitly taking the perspective of horizonally implied
objects related to the one in focus:
every object is the mirror of all others. When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it […]
the qualities […] which the chimney, the walls, the table can ‘see’; but back of my lamp is
nothing but the face which it ‘shows’ to the chimney. I can therefore see an object in so far as
objects form a system or a world, and in so far as each one treats the others round it as
spectators of its hidden aspects […]. Any seeing of an object by me is instantaneously reiterated
among all those objects in the world which are apprehended as co-existent […]. 17
Merleau-Ponty offers another illustration to help us grasp just how thoroughly different
phenomena are horizonally integrated. He has us consider when we view the tiled floor at the
bottom of a pool of water. We might think that we are seeing the geometry of the tiles despite
the wavy distortions that
16
17
OE, p. 1624/187.
PP, pp. 82–83/68.
187
the water produces. Yet, really the floor, as the appearance that it happens to be, is seeable
only because it is given to us through the rippling water. We should not assume there is such a
thing as an object seen in itself. All things are sensed in their intermeshment with everything
else. Even the water we mentioned is not contained only there in the pool. When we raise our
eyes to the trees above the water, we see the webbed play of the water’s reflections. The tree
foliage has its particular appearance only because the water below it “sends into it, upon it its
active and living essence.” 18
Yet, because these horizonal objects are indeterminate and ambiguous, we are
motivated to turn our attention toward them, which then makes them determinate. To better
understand this process, Merleau-Ponty refers us to the way that children acquire the ability to
perceive distinct colors. At first, they can only distinguish colored things from non-colored
things. Then, they differentiate warm and cool shades of colored regions. Finally, they can
discern different colors. The psychologist mistakenly thinks that the child originally perceived
the different specific colors in their determinacy, except the child was merely unaware of the
colors’ identities. So according to this psychological interpretation, children first can see the
redness of the red, with its difference to the blueness of blue, but they just have not yet
learned the corresponding names and concepts for the color. Merleau-Ponty says that instead
the colors were originally seen in an indeterminate form, and only gradually does the child
come to constitute them distinctly. In other words, the child sees different colors but not so
much the distinctions between them, although these differences hang implicitly on the horizon
of her awareness. 19 There are relations, then, between the colors that are seen, although they
appear only implicitly. So, when children early on see neighboring things bearing different
colors, they have a vague sense that the visual appearances differ in some significant way.
After later learning how to detect the differences between the colors, they then see them
determinately and uniquely. Because the colors began indeterminately, their becoming a
determinate appearance was merely on the horizon of the child’s awareness. We might here
notice another sort of horizon. The determinate forms were there indirectly in the beginning
stage. Yet, their arrival to the child’s consciousness is pending; in a way, it hangs on a sort of
temporal horizon too, being at the edge of the grasp of the present intentions.
The parts of our phenomenal world are given so pre-integrated that even when the
world suddenly appears to us quite differently than the moment before, in a way we were
already anticipating the alteration. 20 He depicts a scene to illustrate. We walk along a
shoreline. Before us is a ship run aground in the beach. Behind it is a forest, and the ship’s
masts blend in with the trees, preventing us from initially noticing them as belonging to the
ship. Yet, there
18
OE, p. 1616/182.
PP, p. 38/29–30.
20
PP, p. 23/15.
19
188
will come a moment when we feel that the look of some of the trees is on the verge of
altering. Before even seeing the masts as distinct from the forest, we felt some sort of tension
in their appearance, just as “a storm is imminent in storm clouds.” 21 Even when originally
mistaken, we still perceived all the distinguishing qualities of the masts, and they told us
indirectly they were not trees. So from the beginning we had a “vague expectation” that there
was something more to be understood in the appearance of the forest:
The unity of the object is based on the foreshadowing of an imminent order which is about to
spring upon us a reply to the questions merely latent in the landscape. It solves a problem set
only in the form of a vague feeling of uneasiness, it organizes elements which up to that
moment did not belong to the same universe and which, for that reason, […] could not be
associated. 22
So whenever the phenomenal composition of our world changes, it is because we turn our
attention to some detail that alters the way we configure the whole. We were motivated to turn
our attention in the direction of other phenomenal parts; so in the case of the ship and forest,
at the edges of our awareness we sensed some details that told us there was something
questionable about certain trees. Only afterward did we learn that these details were
indications that the trees were really ship masts instead. So in other words, even though we
might have these dramatic experiences where the phenomenal world around us radically
rearranges before our eyes, it does not involve a complete incoherence from one moment to
the next; the new, altered world was somehow still there on the horizon of our awareness, if
only as the suggestion that there is more to be seen. In fact, it is only because it was there on
the horizon that we were motivated to discover it. This holds as well in Merleau-Ponty’s
account of children’s acquisition of color sense. Once they learn how to discern different
colors from one another, there is “a change of the structure of consciousness, the
establishment of a new dimension of experience, the setting forth of an a priori.” 23 So,
children lose the ability to see colors in that indeterminate way they appeared in early
childhood. It would seem then that they find themselves in a new world that is incoherent with
the prior one now hovering marginally in their retentional consciousness, from back when
they were only able to see colors indeterminately. Yet, when we come to these determinations
that change the structures of our awareness, they begin as horizons giving us preformed “new
regions in the total world.” 24 It is true that after their acquisition, the older structures are
destroyed. However, this process is one of bringing out something already implicit in the
previous structures of
21
PP, p. 24/17.
PP, p. 25/17.
23
PP, p. 38/30.
24
Ibid.
22
189
consciousness. So, rather than suggesting an incoherence in the objects and in our
consciousness, it instead attests to their continuous self-unity:
It is precisely by overthrowing data that the act of attention is related to previous acts, and the
unity of consciousness is thus built up step by step through a ‘transition-synthesis’. The miracle
of consciousness consists in its bringing to light, through attention, phenomena which reestablish the unity of the object in a new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it. 25
3. Synaesthetic Integration
All implicitly and explicitly perceived phenomenal objects of our world, then, are like
threads woven together through the integrating “fabric” of our body. 26 It gives the world a
certain density or “thickness,” just as the tissues of our muscles or our skin are intermeshed so
as to produce the thickness of our flesh. Moreover, perception, Merleau-Ponty thinks, must
always involve an intermixing of all our senses. An object is then “an organism of colours,
smells, sounds and tactile appearances which symbolize, modify and accord with each other
according to the laws of a real logic […].” 27 The different sense qualities of the object are
organically intertwined, because from the beginning, our body’s sense organs integrate their
functioning to such a degree that we can find no sense-datum that is not conditioned by the
others. It is not merely that one sense helps the others; rather, the impressions of one sense are
found implicitly within the others, and all our impressions are intertwined with our bodily
motions. When Merleau-Ponty contracts his foot, for example, he can see this motion in his
mind even when wearing his shoes. 28 We also never actually see how our body looks when
we walk, but we will recognize our gait visually when we see it filmed or if we watch it in our
shadow. 29 So, our bodily integration was already there from the beginning:
I do not translate the ‘data of touch’ ‘into the language of seeing’ or vice versa – I do not bring
together one by one the parts of my body; this translation and this unification are performed
once and for all within me: they are my body, itself. 30
Another way to articulate this sense-integration is that all sense-data are synaesthetic.
He has us consider patients who lost the ability to visually perceive color qualities. Even
without this capacity, they were still able many times to
25
PP, p. 39/30.
PP, p. 272/235.
27
PP, p. 48/38.
28
PP, p. 174/149.
29
Ibid.
30
PP, p. 175/150.
26
190
determine the colors shining upon them, on account of how it was perceived in its mixture
with the other senses. They might for example know it is yellow when their body responds as
if feeling something stinging it; one patient said, “I clenched my teeth, and so I know that it is
yellow.” 31 Of course even when we do visually perceive color qualities, we also sense them in
these other ways as well. It is not that we first see red and then our body responds by
enlivening itself; rather, just as soon as we see red, our body is enlivened at the same time,
because seeing red is partly a tactile sensation felt throughout our bodies. 32 “Synaesthetic
perception is the rule,” he writes, and
the senses intercommunicate by opening on to the structure of the thing. One sees the hardness
and brittleness of glass, and when, with a tinkling sound, it breaks, this sound is conveyed by
the visible glass. One sees the springiness of steel, the ductility of red-hot steel, the hardness of
a plane blade, the softness of shavings. 33
He has us consider that although we have two eyeballs with each one giving us different
streams of visual data, we still have a unified view of one phenomenal world. He thinks that
the visual quality of sounds and audible properties of colors come about through the same sort
of synthesis of sense-data. Because all our senses are pre-integrated in this way, he says that
their unity is an “a priori truth.” 34 Our body is “not a collection of adjacent organs, but a
synergetic system”; their functions are all linked together in our actions. 35
4. Immersive and Sympathetic Integrations with the World
When a child reaches out for something, from the beginning she feels herself a part of
the world around her, because on that basis she knows that her body could move among the
things around her and take them into her grasp. Our integration with the world, then, is
evident from the way our senses allow our body to immediately move around and interact
with all the other parts of the world. 36 In fact, we even take up the objects around us and make
them extensions of our own sensibility. Merleau-Ponty’s famous example is the blind man
walking with a stick. When first beginning to use it, he might feel the stick making contact
with his hand. Yet after a while, it becomes as though the end of the stick is his new point of
contact with the objects around him. He no longer feels the contact between his hand and the
stick but instead
31
PP, p. 244/211.
PP, p. 245/211.
33
PP, p. 265/229.
34
PP, p. 255/221.
35
PP, p. 270/234.
36
OE, p. 1594/162.
32
191
between the stick and the ground or other things his stick is “feeling.” 37 We are inherently
geared to be organically integrated with the objective world around us. The blind person’s
awareness wants and tries to extend into its surrounding world. We use telephones to extend
our voices and ears into distant places. Our gaze, Merleau-Ponty writes, is analogous to the
blind man’s stick: like his cane, our vision feels out the world in an interrogative way, ranging
over objects and dwelling on them. This is “the organic relationship between subject and
world, the active transcendence of consciousness, the momentum which carries it into a thing
and into a world by means of its organs and instruments.” 38
Our body’s immersion in the world is evident as well in its sympathetic relationships
with it. Consider how when we hear a sound, part of our ear apparatus vibrates at the same
frequency, in sympathy with the air’s vibrations. It is as though there were a place of
crossing-over between the world and our body: “In the same way I give ear, or look, in the
expectation of a sensation, and suddenly the sensible takes possession of my ear or my gaze,
and I surrender a part of my body, even my whole body, to this particular manner of vibrating
and filling space known as blue or red.” 39 He also has us think of the holy sacrament of
communion. The bread is not only something sensible. As well, it is believed that when we
ingest it, it communicates into us the “real presence of God.” Sensation is like this too. We are
not only given an impression of the world around us, but enter into communion with the
world by means of the sympathetic relation of that sensation. 40 When our hands are about to
feel something smooth, they take up a certain “degree,” “rate,” and “direction of movement”
appropriate for feeling that kind of surface, instead of the sorts of motion and readiness
needed to feel something rough. 41 The smooth thing called out to our hands to tell them how
it needed to be felt, so that even before making physical contact, the smooth thing in a sense
placed itself upon our hands. So, we cannot say that we are the toucher performing the action,
and the smooth thing is something passive receiving our action. The smooth object acts on us
just as much as we act on it. The thing we sense begins as a “vague beckoning” whose call to
us allows us to “synchronize” with it. 42 We “interrogate” the object “according to its own
wishes,” which places us into a “pre-established harmony” and “kinship” with it, an a priori
sort of pre-condition of organic integration with the world, necessary for us being able
37
PP, p. 177/152.
PP, p. 178/152–153.
39
PP, p. 245/212.
40
PP, pp. 245–246/212.
41
M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, in C. Lefort (ed.), Œuvres, Paris: Gallimard, 2010, p. 1759; The
Visible and the Invisible, C. Lefort (ed.), English trans. by A. Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1986, p. 133. Henceforth abbreviated as VI, with French/English page numbers.
42
PP, p. 248/214.
38
192
to sense the things around us. 43 Our hands can “[open] upon a tactile world” when we are
feeling the world from within them, but this also requires that our hands remain accessible to
being already touched by the outside world, which informs them how to go about their
touching. In this way, there is a “crisscrossing” of the touching and the tangible. By opening
themselves up in this way, our hands incorporate themselves into the world they feel out; “the
two systems are applied upon one another, as the two halves of an orange”: 44
Thus a sensible datum which is on the point of being felt sets a kind of muddled problem for my
body to solve. I must find the attitude which will provide it with the means of becoming
determinate, of showing up as blue; I must find the reply to a question which is obscurely
expressed. 45
So, we might think of ourselves together with the world we perceive as being of one flesh.
There is an intimacy between us “as close as between the sea and the strand,” 46 while yet we
are still somehow partly our own selves; we do not dissipate into the flesh just because we are
so much a part of it. Objects, he says, do not begin as selfsame things which we as seers come
to view after we begin opening our attention to them. Instead we and the objects are involved
in an intimacy, as if “the gaze itself envelops them, clothes them with its own flesh.” 47
5. Differentials in the Phenomenal World
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze characterizes phenomenal appearances as
involving pure differential relations that present to our awareness some sort of a sign. To
explain these passages, we will first look at how Deleuze reads Leibniz’s micro-perceptions
as being infinitely small sub-phenomena that are describable in calculus terms as differential
relations. Leibniz writes:
when we perceive colors or odors, we are perceiving nothing else but figures and movements,
but figures and movements so small, so varied, and in such great number, that our minds are not
capable in their present states of considering them singly and distinctly. As a consequence we
are not aware that our perceptions are composed of infinitesimally small perceptions of figures
and movements. For example, when we thoroughly mix very fine yellow and blue powders, we
perceive green; we are not aware that what we in fact perceive is only yellow and blue, very
finely mixed. 48
43
VI, p. 1759/133.
Ibid.
45
PP, p. 248/214.
46
VI, p. 1756/130–131.
47
VI, p. 1757/131.
48
G. W. Leibniz, “Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis,” in C. I. Gerhardt (ed.), Die philosophischen
Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, vol. 4, Berlin: Georg Olms, 1965, p. 426; “Reflections on Knowledge,
Truth, and Ideas,” in Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays, English trans. by P. Schrecker and A. M.
Schrecker, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965, p. 10.
44
193
Deleuze combines this notion of infinitesimally small perceptions with the vanishing
infinitesimals in Leibniz’s differential calculus, and he illustrates with Leibniz’s triangle
demonstration. 49
Fig. 7 Leibniz’ triangle demonstration of vanishing values 50
Leibniz describes a geometrical figure with two triangles sharing a common diagonal line
[figure 7]. As this line moves to the right, one triangle increases while the other decreases.
Yet, the sides of both triangles remain proportional, so the ratio of the larger one always
indicates the ratio of the smaller one. This holds even as the smaller triangle’s sides diminish
to the infinitely small. They have vanished, but their differential relation remains, still
discernible in the larger triangle. 51
49
G. Deleuze, Seminar 22/04/1980, English trans. by C. Stivale, http://www.webdeleuze.com, accessed 14-Dec2011.
50
G. W. Leibniz, Mathematische Schriften, vol. 4: Briefwechsel zwischen Leibniz, Wallis, Varignon, Guido
Grandi, Zendrini, Hermann und Freiherrn von Tschirnhaus, C. I. Gerhardt (ed.), Halle: H. W. Schmidt, 1859;
image taken from the pdf available at Archive.org, http://www.archive.org/details/leibnizensmathe02leibgoog,
accessed 14-Dec-2011.
51
G. W. Leibniz, “Justification du calcul des infinitesimales par celuy de l’algebre ordinaire,” in C. I. Gerhardt
(ed.), Mathematische Schriften, vol. 4: Briefwechsel zwischen Leibniz, Wallis, Varignon, Guido Grandi,
Zendrini, Hermann und Freiherrn von Tschirnhaus, Hildesheim: Olms, 1971, pp. 104–106; “Justification of the
Infinitesimal Calculus by That of Ordinary Algebra,” in L. E. Loemker (ed.), Philosophical Papers and Letters,
English trans. by L. E. Loemker, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1965, p. 545–546.
194
Fig. 8 The vanishing ratio remains displayed in the larger triangle
So according to Deleuze’s reading, when we perceive green, we are really noticing the
differential relations between infinitely small perceptions of blue and yellow. 52 At their basis,
all our perceptions are primarily these undetectable micro-perceptions. Thus, the perception of
green is not really the homogenizing blending of yellow and blue. Green results not from their
assimilation and bleeding into one another, but rather from their differentially jarring up
against each other. And neither the micro-perceptions of yellow nor those of blue have green
on their phenomenal horizon. Thus, the whole is not implied in the parts. So contrary to
Merleau-Ponty’s theory, phenomena in the world around us, for Deleuze, appear to our
perception not when they integrate holistically, but rather when they oppose each other
differentially.
The micro-perceptions are obscure and confused; we perceive nothing in them, and yet
they are like raw phenomenal data that is only secondarily synthesized into constituted
perceptions. So, when the infinitely small perceptions of yellow and blue differentially relate
to produce a higher-order phenomenon of green, our perception comes more into clarity,
because we can better notice the color that we are seeing. As higher and higher orders
differentially relate, the perceptions find themselves having greater clarity; thus, “clarity
emerges from obscurity by way of a genetic process.” 53 The differential
52
G. Deleuze, Le pli. Leibniz et le Baroque, Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1988, p. 119; The Fold: Leibniz and
the Baroque, English trans. by T. Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 90. Henceforth
abbreviated as P, with French/English page numbers.
53
P, p.120/90.
195
relating that produces the higher-order phenomenon in a sense is like a clarity filter, and there
is an infinity of these filters.
Each filter determines which perceptions will differentially relate so to produce
higher-order phenomena on the basis of what is remarkable or notable in that perceptual
situation. To use Gregory Bateson’s formulation, it is a matter of differences that make a
difference. 54 Leibniz gives the example of the noisy sound from a mill or waterfall that we
have become overly accustomed to. Perhaps at first the micro-perceptions of the sound were
remarkable or notable when we initially began living near the waterfall. The first perceptual
filter selects the micro-perceptions whose differential relations will provide a clearer
perception of the sound. These various sub-perceptions are differentially related yet again and
filtered to an even clearer perception, until reaching the highest order of clarity, the waterfall
sound that we notice explicitly. However, because the sound is monotonous, the noise
gradually becomes less remarkable, and other differential variations in our field of perception
come to be selected instead through differential filtering. 55
By selecting what is remarkable, the perceptions become distinguished but not yet
distinct. A perception obtains distinctness by means of yet another sort of filter that renders
what is remarkable into what is regular. 56 This regularizing of the perceptions is perhaps what
makes them less noticeable or phenomenal. So in the case of the waterfall sound, we at first
distinguish its variations from all the other possible ones that could have differentially related
so to come into clarity in our awareness. We hear it as its own perception, but as long as it
stands out to us in its remarkableness, it seems new and heterogeneous each moment and still
worthy of our attention. Yet, as we gradually realize that it has, for example, a certain range of
volume that it never strays from, and the sorts of sounds it makes and their patterns also stay
within certain ranges of variation, the perception then becomes regular and homogeneous.
Our perception of the waterfall begins with a chaos of varying tiny sounds that demand our
attention, but it all gradually turns into a blanket of ignorable white noise that occupies the
background of our awareness.
For Deleuze, the differential relation between micro-perceptions does not just hold for
all the perceptual data given together in one instant, like all the micro-perceptions of blue and
yellow that we have when seeing the green of an apple; rather, “tiny perceptions are as much
the passage from one perception to another as they are components of each perception.”57
This is because
54
G. Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, London: Wildwood House, 1979, p. 110.
G. W. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, in C. I. Gerhardt (ed.), Die philosophischen
Schriften, vol. 5, Berlin: Weidmann, 1882, p. 47; New Essays on Human Understanding, English trans. by P.
Remnant and J. Bennett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 53–54, and see also P, pp. 116–
117/86. Deleuze uses the example of a watermill in his analysis.
56
P, p. 121/91.
57
P, p. 115/87.
55
196
in a way, the future is already sensed now in the immediate field of micro-perceptions.
Following his waves illustration, Leibniz writes:
the loudest noise in the world would never waken us if we did not have some perception of its
start, which is small, just as the strongest force in the world would never break a rope unless the
least force strained it and stretched it slightly, even though that little lengthening which is
produced is imperceptible. 58
Deleuze reads this to mean that what we perceive now gives us tiny indications of what is to
come.
However abruptly I may flog my dog who eats his meal, the animal will have experienced the
minute perceptions of my stealthy arrival on tiptoes, my hostile odor, and my lifting of the rod
that subtend the conversion of pleasure into pain. How could a feeling of hunger follow one of
satisfaction if a thousand tiny, elementary forms of hunger (for salts, for sugar, butter, etc.) were
not released at diverse and indiscernible rhythms? 59
So like animals, we feel “pricklings,” even though what we will come to perceive is not yet
clear to us. These are tiny perceptions that “are not integrated into present perception.” 60 In
the following moments, more of these tiny pricklings prove remarkable and come out as a
clear and distinguished perception. 61 These subversive micro-perceptions “destabilize the
preceding macroperception while preparing the following one.” 62 This is strikingly similar to
Merleau-Ponty’s notion that we now are implicitly aware of the content of our forthcoming
perceptions. We should emphasize that for Deleuze, the basis for the implicit perception is not
that future macro-perceptions are integrated with present ones, but rather that present ones are
heterogeneous multiplicities with anti-integrational parts that overthrow former phenomenal
appearings rather than blending them together. It is only on the highest order of synthesis, the
regularizing filter that makes perceptions regular and homogeneous, that such a blending
happens.
So recall how a macro-perception is the differential product of sub-phenomena, which
themselves are differentials of yet smaller ones, all the way to the infinitely small. We will
turn now to Deleuze’s explicit discussions of phenomena in Difference and Repetition, and
note how his modification of the J.-H. Rosny energetics formula corresponds to the analysis
of Leibnizian micro-perceptions:
58
G. W. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, op. cit., p. 47; New Essays, op. cit., p. 54.
P, p. 115/87.
60
P, p. 116/87.
61
Ibid.
62
P, p. 115/87.
59
197
Every intensity is an E - E′, where each E refers to an e - e′, and e to ε - ε′ etc.: each intensity is
already a coupling (in which each element of the couple refers in turn to couples of elements of
another order), thereby revealing the qualitative content of quantity. We call this state of
infinitely doubled difference which resonates to infinity disparity. Disparity – in other words,
difference or intensity (difference of intensity) – is the sufficient reason of all phenomena, the
condition of that which appears.63
Phenomena, Deleuze explains, flash in signal-sign systems, which we will illustrate with the
orders of perception. When the system itself has at least two heterogeneous series – “two
disparate orders capable of entering into communication” – then it is a signal. 64 Consider, for
example, the sub-phenomenal and the macro-phenomenal levels.
The phenomenon that flashes across this system, bringing about the communication between
disparate series, is a sign. […] Every phenomenon is composite because not only are the two
series which bound it heterogeneous but each is itself composed of heterogeneous terms,
subtended by heterogeneous series which form so many sub-phenomena. 65
The green flashes out as the differential relation between yellow and blue, which themselves
are differential relations, and so on to infinity. Green flashed out phenomenally because it was
remarkable in that situation, and perhaps that is why we might call it a sign in Deleuze’s sense
of the term here. The sound of the waterfall does not representationally signify anything when
it flashes out, but it alerts our awareness to something remarkable in our phenomenal world.
6. Bodily Differentials
Deleuze also uses Leibniz’s diagram when discussing Spinoza’s bodily affection,
which will allow us to explain the anti-integrative relations between both our body and its
world and also those within the Deleuzian phenomenal body itself. To do so, we begin with
his interpretation of Spinoza’s simplest bodies so as to link his renditions of Spinozistic
bodily composition and affective variation.
63
G. Deleuze, Différence et repetition, Paris: PUF, 1968, p. 287; Difference and Repetition, English trans. by P.
Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 222. Henceforth abbreviated as DR, with French/English page
numbers. Rosny’s original formulation does not have the third coupling ε - ε′. Deleuze adds it, perhaps to
emphasize that the orders go on to infinity. See J.-H. Rosny, Les sciences et le pluralisme, Paris: Félix Alcan,
1922, p. 6.
64
DR, p. 286/222.
65
Ibid.
198
Nested within the second book of Spinoza’s Ethics is a section known as “The Short
Treatise on Physics,” where Spinoza explains the composition of compound bodies. On the
most fundamental level, bodies are composed of simplest bodies, which are distinguishable
from one another only on the basis of their differences in speeds and slownesses. 66 However,
simplest bodies are not atoms for Spinoza. By means of his novel interpretations of Spinoza’s
12th and 32nd letters, the “Letter on Infinity” and the “Letter on Blood,” Deleuze
characterizes these simplest bodies as pure differential relations, even though the letters
predate the invention of differential calculus. 67 And it is also on this basis that Deleuze
portrays Spinozistic bodily composition as being based on difference rather than on
integration, despite Spinoza’s language suggesting otherwise. Spinoza writes that simplest
bodies become “reciprocally united to each other” when “they are in reciprocal contact with
each other, or if they are moved with the same or different degrees of speed in such a way that
they communicate their motions to each other in some fixed ratio.” 68 However, this “fixed
ratio” for Deleuze is a relation of continuous co-variation. What makes the relation fixed is
not that it stays the same, but rather that the simplest bodies adaptively co-vary so that they
may together maintain themselves as a compound despite each one affectively altering the
other. To explain, Deleuze turns to Spinoza’s “Letter on Blood.”
Here Spinoza writes about the particles of blood, which are the tiniest parts of “lymph,
chyle, etc.,” using terminology similar to when he describes simplest bodies in the Ethics.
Parts make up wholes when “the laws or nature of one part adapts itself to the laws or nature
of another part in such wise that there is the least possible opposition between them.” 69
Deleuze takes into account that the simplest bodies are not atoms, and thus are not the basic
indivisible extending bodies that make up larger extending bodies. 70 Instead, they are
infinitely small partitions found together in infinite sets. According to Deleuze’s reading,
when the simplest bodies of different sets continuously affect each other’s speeds and
maintain their continuous co-modification, they compose compound bodies. And as well, the
simplest bodies can be regarded as infinitely small vanishing terms whose differential value
between their
66
B. Spinoza, Ethica, in C. Gebhardt (ed.), Opera, vol. 2, Heidelberg: Winter, 1972, p. 97; Ethics, English trans.
by G. H. R. Parkinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 126.
67
S. Duffy, The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze, Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2006, p. 48.
68
B. Spinoza, Ethica, op. cit., pp. 99–100; Ethics, op. cit., p. 128.
69
B. Spinoza, Epistolae, in C. Gebhardt (ed.), Opera, vol. 4, Heidelberg: Winter, 1972, p. 170; The Letters,
English trans. by S. Shirley, Cambridge: Hackett, 1995, p. 192.
70
B. Spinoza, Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae Pars I. & II., in C. Gebhardt (ed.), Opera, vol. 1,
Heidelberg: Winter, 1972, p. 190; The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, English trans. by S. Shirley,
Cambridge: Hackett, 1998, p. 53. See also G. Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression, Paris: Les
éditions de minuit, 1968, p. 187; Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, English trans. by M. Joughin, New
York: Zone, 1990, p. 204.
199
speeds determines the compound’s power to affect other bodies and to sustain its differential
composition under the influence of detrimental affections. 71 For example,
chyle is an infinite set of very simple bodies. Lymph is another infinite set of the very simple
bodies. What distinguishes the two infinite sets? It is the differential relation! You have this
time a dy/dx which is: the infinitely small parts of chyle over the infinitely small parts of lymph,
and this differential relation tends towards a limit: the blood, that is to say: chyle and lymph
compose blood. 72
Our blood, then, is a “fixed ratio” only in the sense that the lymph and chyle maintain their
continuously varying differential relation instead of splitting apart and forming differential
relations with other bodies; in other words, their being related in a ratio remains fixed, even
though the value of that ratio is under continuous alteration.
Yet, the blood will decompose under the affective influence of arsenic, for example.
The poison’s simplest bodies have a differential value that, rather than allowing the arsenic to
combine with the blood, instead causes the lymph and chyle to lose their co-variational
relations and to then take up relations with other simplest bodies. 73 Note as well that the
blood’s power to sustain itself is dependent on its differential relation to other parts of the
body. The blood differentially relates with other tissues to make up organs, which themselves
differentially co-compose to constitute the whole body. Our body is then made of various
levels of differential composition, all the way down to the infinitely smallest level of pure
differences without terms. So when we are affected, our body’s total level of power varies
depending on whether the affecting bodies increase or decrease the power of our compounds’
ability to retain their continually altering relations. Arsenic, upon entering our body,
decomposes the blood, which then decomposes higher layers of our composition, and so on,
sending shock waves of disruptive affections throughout all the levels of our body. As
Spinoza writes: “I understand a body to have died when its parts are so disposed that they
maintain a different ratio of motion and rest to one another.” 74 As we will find, these
compositional disruptions are matters of continuously varying affective intensities sweeping
throughout our bodies and altering their power levels.
So as to better understand the continuous variations of our body’s overall power or
perfection, Deleuze returns to differential calculus concepts. We will need to conceive
affections as though they are like instantaneous velocities;
71
G. Deleuze, Spinoza. Philosophie pratique, Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1981, p. 47; Spinoza: Practical
Philosophy, English trans. by R. Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights, 1988, p. 32.
72
G. Deleuze, Seminar 10/03/1981, English trans. by S. Duffy, http://www.webdeleuze.com and
http://www.univ-paris8.fr, accessed 14-Dec-2011.
73
Ibid.
74
B. Spinoza, Ethica, op. cit., p. 240; Ethics, op. cit., p. 256.
200
they would be more like tendencies-toward-change that express themselves in a pure instant,
and as such they are intensive quantities rather than extensive ones. 75 One way to visualize
this is to imagine a ball tied to a string and swung around in the air. At every phase of its
motion, its direction is continuously varying, so as to form a circle. Yet, if we cut the string,
the ball does not fly off in a spiral, but rather moves in a straight line. This is because at every
instant the ball is tending straight outward even though it actually moves circularly [figure 9].
Fig. 9 Ball spinning on a string
This path that lies at a right angle to the string would also be a tangent to a circle’s curve at
that location. For a curve moving in a somewhat more irregular path, finding its tendencytoward-change is more complex, and here is where we might use something like Leibniz’s
method. We create a triangle on the basis of how the curve’s dimensions extend in a certain
region. Then, as with Leibniz’s triangles, we slowly diminish the two triangle legs, and the
third diagonal side gives us the tangent, which also tells us which way the curve is tending at
that place [figure 10].
Fig. 10 Tangent obtained through vanishing values
So in this way, as the triangle legs almost completely contract upon each other, the diagonal
line gives us the intensive value of the tendency-toward-change.
75
G. Deleuze, Seminar 20/01/1981, English trans. by S. Duffy, http://www.webdeleuze.com and
http://www.univ-paris8.fr, accessed 14-Dec-2011.
201
Then, on the basis of Spinoza’s correspondence with Blyenbergh in letters 18 through
24, Deleuze characterizes affections as being series of instantaneous affective variations.76
Blyenbergh would like to know how it is possible that our perfection, that is, our power of
affection, is always altering, and yet our essence is eternal. Blyenbergh writes “nothing else
pertains to an essence than that which it possesses at the moment it is perceived,” 77 which
Deleuze reformulates as “there belongs to an essence only the present, instantaneous affection
that it experiences insofar as it experiences it.” 78
Deleuze offers an illustration for how affections are continuous variations that are
given as differential relations in the sense of instantaneous velocities. We suppose we are
meditating in a dark room. When someone abruptly enters and turns on the light, our
concentration is broken and we are blinded. We become aware that our power of affection has
decreased instantaneously in a “lightning fast” alteration: “Two successive affections, in cuts.
The passage is the lived transition from one to the other,” and we experience this transition as
the “phenomenon of passage.” Every passage between affections is then “necessarily an
increase of power or a decrease of power.” 79 So if we were instead feeling for our glasses in
the dark, and then someone turns on a softer light, our power instantaneously increases. What
we feel in that instant is the intensity of the change, and thus we are phenomenally aware
from moment to moment of a continuous alteration of affective intensity.
So, we see that the continuous variation of affection not only involves a series of
discrete intensities, but is continuous like a curve or wave as well. Deleuze elaborates this
when discussing the sequences of ideas that we have while being continuously affected. When
bodies affect us, we obtain inadequate ideas of them. Deleuze says, “I look at the sun, and the
sun little-by-little disappears and I find myself in the dark of night; it is thus a series of
successions, of coexistences of ideas, successions of ideas.” 80 Corresponding to these ideas is
the continuous variation of increase and decrease in our power of action. To illustrate, he has
us imagine that while walking down the street, we suddenly encounter our enemy Peter, and
the idea of him makes us afraid. Yet, just then we notice our friend Paul; we turn our attention
to him and become empowered by his charm. As we transitioned from the idea of Peter to the
idea of Paul, we experienced our power continuously increase. “In other words,” Deleuze
says, “there is a continuous variation in the form of an increase-diminution-increasediminution of the power of acting or the force of existing of someone according to the ideas
which she has,” and “this kind of melodic line
76
Ibid.
B. Spinoza, Epistolae, op. cit., p. 137; Letters, op. cit., p. 160.
78
G. Deleuze, Seminar 20/01/1981, op. cit.
79
Ibid.
80
G. Deleuze, Seminar 24/01/1978, English trans. by T. S. Murphy, http://www.webdeleuze.com and
http://www.univ-paris8.fr, accessed 14-Dec-2011.
77
202
of continuous variation will define affect.” 81 It is a continuity made up of a series of
intensities. So to solve Blyenbergh’s objection, then, Deleuze explains that an existing mode
like our body is something that continuously varies in power on account of its affections. Yet,
what is eternal about our modal essence is the fact that it is a range of possible power levels
that our existing body can have, and when our power dips below the lowest threshold of our
range, our body ceases to express our modal essence and instead decomposes into parts that
express other essences. So, even while our body continuously alters throughout its duration,
the essence it expresses remains eternally the same range of intensive quantities.
To further explicate the phenomenological value of Deleuze’s rendition of Spinozistic
affection, we should note his distinction between “affection” (affectio) and “affect”
(affectus). 82 An affection is the effect that colliding bodies have on one another, and these
effects determine the compositional integrity of each affected body. When our own body is
affected, the affection itself serves as a sign that makes us aware of how much power we have
at that moment. An affect, however, is more like an instantaneous variation or tendencytoward-change. It tells us whether that affection is tending to increase or decrease our power,
and how strongly it is doing so. Affects, then, serve as signs of the affection’s intensity. Since
affections make us aware merely of our quantities of power, he calls them “scalar.” Affects,
however, he considers “vector,” because they also indicate to our awareness the up or down
direction of the affection’s influence on our power. If we regard the affection as a place along
a curve representing an increase or decrease of power, then the affect would be like the
tangent at those locations, indicating how strongly and in which direction the instantaneous
variation is tending. 83 And because affections and affects are signs that we interpret
immediately, they then involve a sort of phenomenal bodily awareness of the way things in
the world appear to us when they affect our bodies.
Deleuze elaborates this affective awareness in his interpretation of Spinoza’s first two
kinds of knowledge. We obtain knowledge of the first kind through our reception of affective
signs that indicate an increase or decrease in our levels of power. The sun’s particles
shockingly strike our skin, and we become aware of whether and how strongly the sun is
empowering or weakening our body. 84 The second kind of knowledge is more like “knowhow” (savoir faire). We might be under the continuous detrimental affection of a body that
will decompose our composition if we do not adapt and maintain our differential relation with
it. To illustrate, Deleuze has us consider a line in Dante’s
81
Ibid.
Ibid.
83
G. Deleuze, “Spinoza et les trois ‘éthiques’,” in Critique et clinique, Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1993, pp.
172–173; “Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics’,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, English trans. by D. W. Smith,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 138–139.
84
Ibid.
82
203
Inferno: 85 “The rain makes them howl like dogs; with one side they screen the other; they
often turn themselves, the impious wretches.” 86 Rain droplets are pelting a damned soul,
disrupting the composition of his skin at that location and thereby sending shock waves of
decompositional forces throughout the rest of his body. Yet, to maintain his constitution, the
soul turns up a new side of his body that is more able to sustain the affections. He is aware of
how the rain affects him, and he thus knows how to self-affectively alter himself so to
maintain his differential contact with it. Our active self-affection and adaptive interaction with
the world around us is what Deleuze here calls “rhythm.” He also offers the example of
swimming through a powerful wave. When we collide with the wave, its affection begins to
decompose our body. Yet, by self-affectively altering the arrangements of our own body’s
parts, we may swim in conjunction with the wave and together form a larger composite
body. 87 Deleuze suggests another illustration to explain more clearly how affective rhythm
involves couplings of continuous affective variations. He has us consider a dual improvisation
of a violin and a piano. On the one hand, each one needs to improvisationally choose its own
development. Yet, the musicians’ decisions will influence how the other plays in concord with
it. So, in order for both instruments to maintain their differential co-composition, they must
make self-modifications that are differentially compatible with those of the other player. 88
7. The Phenomenal Body without Organs
We will now draw an even stronger contrast between a Deleuzian phenomenological
body and a Merleau-Pontian one, by applying Spinozistic affective rhythm to the “rhythm of
sensation” in Deleuze’s more phenomenologically relevant text, Francis Bacon: The Logic of
Sensation. We keep in mind that affections proceed as a continuous variation that on the one
hand is made up of discrete instantaneous intensities, while on the other hand still forming a
fluid curve or “wave” of sorts. Likewise, each figure in Bacon’s paintings presents a “shifting
sequence or series” of intensive variations, causing the sensation to exist “at diverse levels.” 89
Deleuze then offers four problematic hypotheses to explain how sensation is a matter of
differences of level, with the fourth being the “phenomenological hypothesis.” It regards the
levels as being different do-
85
G. Deleuze, Seminar 24/03/1981, English trans. by T. S. Murphy, http://www.webdeleuze.com and
http://www.univ-paris8.fr, accessed 14-Dec-2011.
86
Dante, The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, English trans. by J. Carlyle, London: J. M. Dent, 1900, p. 61.
87
G. Deleuze, Seminar 24/01/1978, op. cit.
88
G. Deleuze, Seminar 31/03/1981, http://www.univ-paris8.fr, accessed 14-Dec-2011.
89
G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, Paris: Éditions du seuil, 2002, pp. 41–42; Francis
Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, English trans. by D. W. Smith, London: Continuum, 2002, p. 27. Henceforth
abbreviated as FB, with French/English page numbers.
204
mains of the senses, with each one being integrated with the others in a Merleau-Pontian
synaesthetic way; for example, when our eyes see the stomping hooves of the bulls in Bacon’s
bullfighting paintings, our ears seemingly hear the noises they make. In this sense, the painter
would “make visible a kind of original unity of the senses.” Deleuze rejects this and the other
hypotheses, because they do not take into account the “vital power” of sensational rhythm.90
In simple sensations, he writes, rhythm “appears as the vibration that flows through the body
without organs, it is the vector of the sensation, it is what makes the sensation pass from one
level to another.” 91 Recall that the “vector” of the affect-sign is the intensity of the affection’s
increase or decrease in value. Also, these affective intensities send shock waves of disruption
throughout the body’s composition, causing it to decompose and recompose, in accordance
with a “rhythmic” co-variation within and between bodies. So, Deleuze’s reading of
Spinozistic affect will now help us better characterize the phenomenological value of his body
without organs, for he writes that it is “an intense and intensive body. It is traversed by a wave
that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the variations of its amplitude. Thus
the body does not have organs, but thresholds or levels.” 92 In Deleuze’s Spinozistic body,
these intensive levels are precisely what causes our bodily composition to shift and change its
arrangements, and the more rhythmically our body acts, the more it breaks down its normal
organic divisions and relations to produce new functional relations between its parts. In other
words, the rhythm of affection, just like the rhythm of sensation, pushes our bodies to the
limits of its organization, tending it toward being a body without organs. We see this
correlation as well in Deleuze’s notion of the indeterminate and temporary organs of sensation
moving from place to place in bodies without organs. The exposed side of the damned soul in
Dante’s Inferno is the point of contact where the pelting rain distributes its decompositional
affective shock waves throughout him. By turning another side upward, he self-affectively
sends within himself waves of affective alteration so to rearrange the relations of his body,
and by doing so, he creates a new site of sensitivity to the external waves of affection.
Because he continually twists his sides around, each new organ of sensation replaces the prior
one, making all of them temporary and indeterminate. Likewise, Deleuze writes of the body
without organs:
A wave with a variable amplitude flows through the body without organs; it traces zones and
levels on this body according to the variations of its amplitude. When the wave encounters
external forces at a particular level, a sensation appears. An organ will be determined by this
encounter, but it is a provisional
90
FB, pp. 45–46/30.
FB, p. 71/51.
92
FB, p. 47/32.
91
205
organ that endures only as long as the passage of the wave and the action of the force, and
which will be displaced in order to be posited elsewhere. 93
So by interpreting Deleuze’s body without organs in this Spinozistic language, we
may better explain his explicit attack on phenomenology when he contrasts the body without
organs to the phenomenological lived body:
This ground, this rhythmic unity of the senses, can be discovered only by going beyond the
organism. The phenomenological hypothesis is perhaps insufficient because it merely invokes
the lived body. But the lived body is still a paltry thing in comparison with a more profound and
almost unlivable Power [Puissance]. We can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where
rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are
perpetually and violently mixed. Beyond the organism, but also at the limit of the lived body,
there lies […] the body without organs. 94
According to the “phenomenological hypothesis,” the lived body’s sense-organ domains are
synaesthetically linked. To contrast it with the body without organs, consider a Bergsonian
example that Deleuze sometimes evokes: a cow automatically recognizing grass. 95 The cow is
able to recognize grass because its habitual behaviors have formed the motor equivalent of a
general idea.
In the animal itself, we find representations which lack only reflection and some
disinterestedness to be general ideas in the full sense of the term: if not, how should a cow that
is being led stop before a meadow, no matter which, simply because it enters into the category
that we call grass or meadow? 96
A living being selects from a pool of differences the parts or elements that satisfy one of its
needs. Thus, although each experience of grass is different, they are all grouped together,
because they each satisfy the cow’s hunger. The cow then can dip its head mechanically and
eat the grass, without an intense awareness of all the meadow’s variations that would
distinguish one clump from another. Bergson illustrates a sort of dephenomenalization that
happens as our bodies become more accustomed and integrated into our surroundings.
I take a walk in a town seen then for the first time. At every street corner I hesitate, uncertain
where I am going. […] there is nothing in one attitude
93
FB, p. 49/34.
FB, p. 47/32.
95
See DR, p. 176/135; G. Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’image-temps, Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1985, p. 62; Cinema
2: The Time Image, English trans. by H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Athlone, 1989, p. 42.
96
H. Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant. Essais et conférences, Paris: Félix Alcan, 1934, p. 66; The Creative
Mind, English trans. by M. Andison, Westport, Connecticut : Greenwood, 1946, p. 62.
94
206
which foretells and prepares future attitudes. Later, after prolonged sojourn in the town, I shall
go about it mechanically, without having any distinct perception of the objects which I am
passing. […] these accompanying movements are organized to a degree which renders
perception useless. I began by a state in which I distinguished only my perception; I shall end in
a state in which I am hardly conscious of anything but automatism. 97
Yet, suppose the cow sees what looks like grass, eats it, only to find that it has the
plastic taste of artificial turf. Quite suddenly, what the cow is eating becomes remarkable, and
it comes to the forefront of its awareness. The parts of its phenomenal world are not
integrating, as its bodily domains of tasting and seeing are forced to work simultaneously in a
disharmonious way. As well, the cow stops its habitual action of dipping its head to eat the
grass and in that way loses its integration with its world, as though the world suddenly
became foreign to the cow. Thus, eating grass stands out as a potently phenomenal experience
when the cow’s horizons cease to integrate. “Rhythm” in the Francis Bacon text is the
unpredictable varying of the waves of sensation that affect each bodily domain differently in
such a way that the sense data cannot be processed, regularized, recognized, and thereby
dephenomenalized. While this use of the term “rhythm” is surely quite distinct from the
Spinozistic sense, we might note that even in this context, rhythm also serves to explain the
varying differential relations within the body, within the world, and between the body and the
world that are at work in phenomenal experiences.
8. Conclusion
Merleau-Ponty’s integrationist model of the body would better account for the passive
synthesis of phenomenal objects and for our body’s normal organic functioning at work in
this process. Phenomena for him come to be constituted by means of horizonal integrations,
unfolding over time and occurring on the basis of our body’s internal cooperations and its
sympathetic interaction with a coherent world. Yet, as the examples of the waterfall and grass
illustrate, the more that the component parts and moments of our perception integrate, and the
more our senses agree on what they sense, and thus the more accustomed to the world around
us our body becomes, the less phenomenally intense the experience is. Hence, the lived body
of Merleau-Ponty is a “paltry thing” compared to the body without organs, for it is incapable
of having intense phenomenal experiences. The body without organs “lies at the limit” of the
lived body, because it is only when the lived body’s harmonious,
97
H. Bergson, Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit, Paris: Germer Baillière et Cie.,
1903, pp. 100–101; Matter and Memory, English. trans. by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, Mineola, New York:
Dover, 2004, p. 110, emphasis mine.
207
integrated functioning breaks down that it comes closer to being the phenomenal body
without organs. Deleuze’s difference-based model, then, can be seen as compatible with
Merleau-Ponty’s model, as long as we distinguish their explanatory purposes. MerleauPonty’s theory better accounts for the ongoing constitution of phenomenal objects, the
familiar things in the world around us, while Deleuze’s theory better explains the intensity of
any given moment of phenomenal experience. Thus, although Deleuze’s model in many
fundamental ways contraposes Merleau-Ponty’s model, we need not regard it as a critique of
phenomenology itself, but rather as a useful contribution to phenomenology’s pool of
theoretical ideas.
Corry Shores
Vlierbeeklaan 38
3010 Kessel-Lo, Belgium
corry.shores@hiw.kuleuven.be
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