notebookeleven

I’ve gone wrong somewhere with the Eternal Return idea in chapter 1 of Difference and Repetition:

The eternal return, according to Deleuze, effectively realises Being in the following way: “Being is said in a single and same sense, but this sense is that of eternal return as the return or repetition of that of which it is said.”

The test of something’s return is it’s excessivity, it’s becoming – different:

“When Nietzsche says that hubris is the real problem of every Heraclitean, or that hierarchy is the problem of free spirits, he means one – and only one – thing: that it is in hubris that everyone finds the being which makes him return…”

(Both quotations from Difference & Repetition, Continuum Press, 2004, p. 51)

Hubris is the repetition of difference, and this repetition is the expression of univocal being. The test of returning is concerned with the idea that production is only expressed in actualising new forms, where ‘hubris’ denotes forces that transgress the qualitative state of a subject such that it is destroyed (i.e. not an oppositional but a generical difference?) and a new process of individuation starts its becoming.

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I was browsing through the Guardians’ interactive blog page, ‘Comment is Free‘, earlier today and there was an interesting article on the parallels between the current anti-Muslim reactions in the West and earlier reactions to Jewish communities at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.  As part of that article there was mention of the 1894 attack on the Greenwich Observatory, just across the road from us here at Greenwich University.  Some further browsing connected me with Mike Davis’ article on the car bomb and the useful reminder of a historical perspective being necessary and vital in any attempt to develop critical thought about the world around us.  (Mike Davis is speaking in London later this month as part of an interesting series of talks being run by the ICA called ‘The new left: then and now’).

I’ve been arguing to my first year ‘Introduction to philosophy’ students that one of the key tasks philosophy can achieve is a degree of empowerment via critical thought.  The very concept of knowledge (classically distinguished as ‘episteme’ or science as opposed to ‘doxa’ or opinion) is used to establish a certain power relation.  The claims of knowledge are more powerful than those of opinion, so goes the argument.   In one sense, of course, this seems incontrovertible – ‘that which we know to be true’ is always to be accepted before ‘that which might or might not be true’ but which, in any case, we do not yet ‘know to be true’.  The role of truth  for most of society, inevitably depends not on truth itself but on this connection of truth and knowledge.  A known truth has a power.  The ability to develop a critical skill, a critical thought, rests primarily on the development of an ability to question how we know what we know.  This, after all, is Plato’s argument in the model of ‘the divided line’ – the knowledge that knows how it is known is superior even to the knowledge that is incontrovertibly true, such as mathematical, deductive knowledge.  For Plato, such knowledge that knows itself is ‘dialectic’ or understanding (noesis) and comes above mere rational thought (dianoia).
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