On Gilles Deleuze (Paris, 1925-1995): Sorbonne educated contemporary French postmodernist philosopher who taught at Paris VII (1969-87) and was known for innovative (infamous) collaborative (with Félix Guattari) two-volume ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ project of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (politically active and a close friend of Michel Foucault, these were said to be seminal expressions of the France’s May 1968 political climate), as well as radical readings of canonical figures (Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Spinoza, Nietzsche, etc.) and aesthetic topics and figures (film, painter Francis Bacon, Kafka, Marquis de Sade, Proust, etc.), all thoroughly cross-disciplinary and highlighted by ideas of intensity (immanence as ‘flux of existence’ that has no transcendental outside and is driven by forces), difference and repetition (as temporality without identity; analysis must proceed not by essence but by structural relations, yet rejection of Hegelian dialectic), and becoming (versus being; and command for creativity yet with demotion of human subject).
Deleuze, “How do we Recognize Structuralism?” in Desert Islands: and Other Texts, 1953-1974 (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2004), 170-92.
1st Criterion: The Symbolic
2nd: Local or Positional
3rd: The Differential and The Singular
4th: The Differenciator, Differentiation
5th: Serial
6th: The Empty Square (la case vide)
7th: From The Subject to Practice
Deleuze “How do we Recognize Structuralism?”
1st Criterion: The Symbolic
Real vs. Imaginary vs. Symbolic
How is the symbolic a structural object?
2nd: Local or Positional
What’s in the symbolic element?
Sens [excess] as positional [games] in topological space [site over subject]
3rd: The Differential and The Singular
Elements {phomenes … singularities … functions}
&
Relations {structures as multiplicities … differentials … variables}
4th: The Differenciator, Differentiation
Virtualities
Whole not total, but is
Time
Unconscious
5th: Serial
Homology of two+ series à contradictions
Slippage
Metaphors and Metonymy
6th: The Empty Square (la case vide)
Petit objet x
Required for games
Phallus
Structural Orders
7th: From The Subject to Practice
Void
Subject as subjected to empty square {à nomad}
. . . M O R E D E T A I L . . .
1st Criterion: The Symbolic … “The refusal to confuse the symbolic with the imaginary, as much as with the real, constitutes the first dimension of structuralism” (171).
Real: “the real in itself is not separable from a certain ideal of unification or of totalization: the real tends towards one, it is one in its ‘truth’” (172)
Imaginary: “As soon as we see two in ‘one,’ as soon as we make doubles, the imaginary appears in person, even if it is in the real that its action is carried out. … The imaginary is always defined by games of mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection, always in the mode of the double” (172)
Symbolic: “the symbol is three, and not merely the third beyond the real and the imaginary. There is always a third to be sought in the symbolic itself; structure is at least triadic, without which it would not ‘circulate’—a third at once unreal, and yet not imaginable” (172).
The symbolic order is “irreducible to the orders of the real and the imaginary, and deeper than they are” (173); it …
Has nothing to do with:
Form
“for structure is not at all defined by an autonomy of the whole, by a preeminence of the whole over its parts, by a Gestalt which would operate in the real and in perception” (173)
Instead: “Structure is defined, on the contrary, by the nature of certain atomic elements which claim to account both for the formation of wholes and for the variation of their parts” (173)
Figures
“nothing to do with figures of the imagination” (173)
Instead: “although structuralism is riddled with reflections on metaphor and metonymy, for these figures themselves imply structural displacements which must account for both the literal and the figurative” (173)
Essence
“Nor has it anything to do with an essence” (173)
Instead: “it is more a combinatory formula supporting formal elements which by themselves have neither form, nor signification, nor representation, nor content, nor given empirical reality, nor hypothetical functional model, nor intelligibility behind appearances” (173)
How is the symbolic a structural object? “Not just the real and the imaginary, but their relations, and the disturbances of these relations, must be thought as the limit of a process in which they constitute themselves in relation to the symbolic. … the symbolic as element of the structure constitutes the principle of a genesis: structure is incarnated in realities and images according to determinable series. Moreover, the structure constitutes series by incarnating itself, but is not derived from them since it is deeper, being the substratum both for the strata of the real and for the heights of imagination” (172).