Sensible Subjects

Two years on.¹ We try to begin again—perpetual beginning.²

Delirium finds its rule and the rule finds its others; rules so associated are the movement of the subject, and subjects associated in turn are the movement of culture. Culture is to effectuate this association. No rule before culture, no subject before the rule.

We study tendency and habit, the subject as effect and effecting. A science of effectivity, practical sociology of the world. All these ways of making do.³

Begin again.

In Chapter 1 of Empiricism and Subjectivity, Gilles Deleuze formulates the mind as a collection of experiences, and indeed as identical to those experiences.⁴ This collection is originally without organization, without system; only when subjected by the world does the collection become a system, the mind a subject. The subject is partial and passional, an effect of the world.

In Chapter 2, Deleuze examines the rules of this subjection. Rules are the means of the satisfaction of the passions. Passions are necessarily socially affected, insofar as subjects are always already social in their constitution. So, rules are the means of social affection, bringing about the integration of sympathies in the various institutions and enterprises of human social being.⁵ This integration is culture, the moral world, the order of ends.⁶

In Chapter 3, Deleuze describes how rules for the satisfaction of the passions come to be general rules of culture. The most successful rules reflect and extend individual passions, liberating the passions from their individual limits. Culture is a project of this expanded passion, and indeed, is the world as such into which the passions are projected and integrated with the passions of others. Thus, in culture, the mind finds constancy for its passions, made subject to the world as an intention, a purpose.⁷ The subject is always already directed or inclined, a project of the world. There are no “faculties” or “occult qualities” of consciousness to be discovered here, only the durable intentions of culture as a collective project of human practical reason.⁸

So, as we at least reach Chapter 4, “God and the World,” Deleuze tries to find an example of a schematism that “would bring together all the significations that we have successively attributed to general rules.”⁹ For Deleuze, the best such example is that of religion, though the argument that follows is typically Deleuzian in its diagonality.¹⁰

Deleuze argues that there are two types of rules—“extensive” and “corrective”—and two sources for rules—“passion” and “knowledge”—amounting to four total “kinds” of rule: extensive rules of passions, corrective rules of passions, extensive rules of knowledge, and corrective rules of knowledge.¹¹ Deleuze sees polytheistic and theistic religions as the two essential “feeling[s]” of his general category of “religion,” with polytheism extending the passions, and theism extending knowledge.¹² Importantly, in both expressions, religion “confuses the accidental with the essential.”¹³ Polytheism schematizes the “diversity” and “irreducibility” of the passions as the activity of the gods, while theism schematizes the “unity of the spectacle of nature” in perception as God’s unique effect, thereby serving as his proof.¹⁴ Each schematization is, for Deleuze, ultimately a “fiction of the imagination,” an essentialization of the source (i.e., the collection of experience) as schema (i.e., the systematization of the collection).¹⁵

While different in source, the two feelings of religion, the polytheistic and theistic, constitute for Deleuze a “dual system of extensive rules,” which are, in the framework laid out in Chapter 2, also referred to as operations of “determination” (along with operations of “establishment” and “correction”).¹⁶ We only briefly touched on this framework in the essay on this chapter, so it is worth doubling back and more clearly articulating it now, since there is some difference in argumentation between Chapters 2 and 4.¹⁷

Establishment, determination, and correction make up the “three dimensions” of a “general rule,” which Deleuze defines as a “system of directed means” for the satisfaction of passions.¹⁸ The general rule integrates individual passions in an institution, a “model of actions.”¹⁹ The sum of these institutions constitutes culture or society, which is, therefore, nothing other than a “set of conventions founded on utility.”²⁰

The dimensions of the general rule are distinct but “simultaneous” in their operation.²¹ The rule is “established by interest and utility” and is “determined by the imagination.”²² This determination is the process of subjection whereby a subject is revealed as a possible model for the unordered collection of the mind, a model that is the reflection of the passional drives in the imagination in the form of a subject that could ultimately satisfy those drives.²³

Insofar as the determination is always a determination of “possible circumstances” of realization, the third operation of the general rule is required: correction. Correction resolves the “lack of adequation between real persons and possible situations.”²⁴ As such, correction operates in the mode of belief—the extension “must itself become now a real situation,” not just a possible one, and in order for this to happen, individual passions “must become the most distant,” and integrated, social passions must become “the nearest.”²⁵ The possible situation must be believed as actually possible, and so to this end the corrective operation imbues the “general interest” with “the vividness that only particular interests can have for us naturally.”²⁶

To return to Chapter 4, Deleuze speaks of the dimensions of the general rule as discrete rules in themselves (extensive, corrective), and it is for this reason that I have used the term “operation” as a synonym for dimension in the preceding paragraphs. This ambiguity in the text makes interpretation difficult, but having now walked carefully through Deleuze’s earlier argument, it becomes more obvious how the four kinds of “rules” of religion unite the significations attributed to general rules previously. And it is here where Deleuze poses the challenge to his readers of how correction might operate in the context of religion: “as religion is corrected, what is really left of it?”²⁷ If religion is a confusion, fiction, or fancy of the imagination (accidental confused for essential), how can it hope to withstand the “total critique” of correction?²⁸

As discussed above, correction closes the gap of adequation between the real and the possible by way of belief. But if, as Deleuze initially posits, the possibility of religion is itself a confusion, that gap can never be closed. The gods disappear in “an abstraction without proportion” and the supreme effect of creation is abolished as a “fictitious usage of causality.”²⁹ By the operation of correction, religion, for Deleuze, is reduced to “pure imagination and mere fancy.”³⁰ A deflationary end, if not for the subsequent turn that Deleuze performs in a repetition of Hume.

“To believe in miracles is a false belief,” Deleuze asserts, “but it is also a true miracle.”³¹ The principles of association are revealed to be operative even in a vacuum, and it is this sheer fact, disclosed for Deleuze by his particular interpretation of religion, that renders religion “justified … in its very special situation, outside culture and outside true knowledge.”³² While the principles of association can neither “know the world as an effect of divine activity” nor “know God as the cause of the world,” the principles remain effective.³³ The principles simply are, without “cause” or “origin”—we may only speak of their genesis in the apophatic mode, of God in the negative as that which causes the principles to cohere in the first place.³⁴

Deleuze names this coherence or “original agreement” of the principles of association “purposiveness.”³⁵ The correction of religion renders this coherence in diagrammatic form, not as an object of knowledge to be “known,” but as the mode of “thought” as such.³⁶ “The idea of God, as originary agreement, is the thought of something in general”—in other words, the idea of God is the most abstract determination of the original coherence of “origin” (nature) and “qualification” (human nature).³⁷ Practical and theoretical reason are always partial, and in their operation can grasp any number of principles that “can furnish us with a coherent discourse on the origin of the world.”³⁸ But generic thought, purposiveness, precedes all such reasoning, is the basis of reasoning, is that which makes it possible for us to “transcend the other perspectives which are equally possible, and to remind us that we are always confronted with partial analogies.”³⁹ Generic thought is “indifferent,” which is to say, it does not differentiate, distinguish, or decide.⁴⁰ Generic thought purposes, is directed; it tends and tilts this way and that, a force or impulse toward the world.⁴¹ Generic thought is the possibility of habituation by the world; it is the primacy of qualification over qualities, signification over signs, individuation over individuals; it is the very movement of subjectivation.

Having used religion to draw the diagram of purposiveness, Deleuze turns to a third confusion of the principle of causality that Hume discusses in his Treatise.⁴² The first confusion, typified for Deleuze by polytheism, is that of “repetitions which do not proceed from experience” (passions essentialized as gods); the second confusion, typified for Deleuze by theism, is that of “a particular object—the world—which cannot be repeated, and which is not, properly speaking, an object” (knowledge essentialized as the unity of the world).⁴³ Citing Hume, these are considered confusions of causality because:

It is only when two species of objects are found to be constantly conjoined, that we can infer the one from the other; and were an effect presented, which was entirely singular, and could not be comprehended under any known species, I do not see, that we could form any conjecture or inference at all concerning its cause.⁴⁴

The gods extend the passions, are determined as gods; the world extends knowledge, is determined as the supreme effect of God. We have already seen how the operation of correction simultaneously deflates the determination while revealing the diagram of purposiveness. What, then, can we learn from the third confusion? The third is actually the problem proper of Hume’s thought, that of the “belief in the distinct and continuous existence of bodies” as Deleuze puts it,⁴⁵ or in Hume’s words, “the continu’d existence of objects in order to connect their past and present appearances, and give them such an union with each other, as I have found by experience to be suitable to their particular natures and circumstances.”⁴⁶

This is the “crux metaphysicorum” of Hume’s philosophy, the “concept of cause” as such.⁴⁷ And for Deleuze, it is the very connection of past and present appearances of objects, the fact of this union, that achieves the “resolution of the contradiction that would arise between the conjunction of two objects in actual experience and the appearance of one of them only in my perception.”⁴⁸ Polytheism gives us repetition, theism gives us the unrepeatable, and insofar as these two reasons, connected in the “dual system” of religion, together reveal the diagram of purposiveness at their base, Deleuze can say that this “fiction of the imagination” is the very operation whereby appearance gains its “coherence and regularity.”⁴⁹ Importantly, we must reiterate that this operation should not be understood as a faculty of the mind. The mind is first and foremost a “delirium.”⁵⁰ The mind has no system in itself; it is merely an “assemblage of things.”⁵¹ For the mind to become a subject, it must be determined, and this determination is not something done “by” the mind but rather “in” the mind.⁵² The association of ideas in the imagination, the systematization of the collection of experience, is not brought about by the subject: “[r]ather than finding its origin, association finds in the imagination its terms and its object.”⁵³ Association produces the subject; association comes from outside.

This argument forms the kernel of Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism.”⁵⁴ Qualities are not possessed by the subject but are rather encountered in the world. It is this very encounter that determines the subject as a subject. This is why Deleuze describes his philosophy as an “aesthetics,” a “science of the sensible.”⁵⁵ Purposiveness, generic thought, is mind “apprehend[ing] directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible.”⁵⁶ This grasp of the sensible is fleeting, but in its repetition the grasp is extended, determined, and corrected, becoming the rule of continuity as such, so laying the template for all other general rules. We see, then, that the concept of cause is to be found, at bottom, in the repetition of the generic contact between the mind and the sensible, in the generalization of the most infinitesimal moment of sense. An “outright fiction” at the very foundation of reason, fantasy and madness as the bases of continuity and consistency.⁵⁷ Philosophy is left to decide “between the contradiction or nothingness,” as Deleuze puts it, or citing Hume, “betwixt a false reason and none at all.”⁵⁸

“Modern philosophy” offers no remedy, Deleuze argues, only “hopes” for a resolution of the contradiction, “and there lies its error.”⁵⁹ The supposed “permanent, irresistible, and universal principles” of the mind (as posited by some philosophers) cannot be separated from the “variable, fanciful, and irregular principles”; reason cannot be separated from madness.⁶⁰ Deleuze, on the other hand, does not take this as reason for despair, but rather as impetus to begin again. Indifference, fancy, madness, delirium—his philosophy starts here, because we, as purposive beings, start here. “The only resource and positivity offered to the mind is nature or practice,” the “middle and temperate region,” the domain of effectivity, of making do.⁶¹ For “good sense” to emerge from the contradiction, “the mind must be referred to nature,” is always already referred to nature, in and through the projects of “moral practice” and “understanding” whereby the subject is constituted, necessarily and originally, as a sensible subject.⁶² This sensibility is both the root of the contradiction and the means by which the contradiction “is regulated by possible corrections and resolved through practice.”⁶³ Sensibility is “life,” activity, everyday pragmatics; sensibility is “science,” the possibility of a generic thought that touches, hypothesizes, experiments, learns.⁶⁴ Sensibility is perpetual beginning which, put otherwise, is to say that sensibility is the “eternal return,” the “infinite which belongs to a single time, the eternity which belongs to an instant,” being with “no beginning or end.”⁶⁵

We find ourselves “always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo,” contradiction as “conjunction,” “and … and … and,” beginning never from a “clean slate” or “ground zero,” but from the “middle,” more and less than beginning, always “coming and going rather than starting and finishing.”⁶⁶ To cite another text, this is where we find ourselves, in finding that “something already was going on,” that “the response is already there before the call goes out,” that we are “already in something.”⁶⁷ Thus spoke Zarathustra: whatever you will, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return.⁶⁸ Begin again, begin right here, in the thick of things, just as you always have.

Notes