as the most alien book imaginable from The Phenomenology of Perception.

Deleuze’s first important published work is available as a PDF (an ebook) and can be downloaded here. Thanks to Continental Philosophy for the link…

Some rather peculiar argument has broken out amongst some of the radical philosopher types in the blogosphere, apparently kicked off, in part at least, by the comments of a blogger called ’k-punk’ (which you can read here - k-punk’s trackbacks don’t seem to work but the page is there). Larval Subjects has a kind of round-up and commentary and there’s some other stuff over at various other blogs. All a little odd and I’m not sure I really know exactly how important the argument is (it intrigued me enough to read through it all but when I came to thinking about it everything seemed a little too ’personalistic’ - then again, that’s kind of the problem the conversation encounters and shows. No doubt it will do it’s work in the unconscious as I think.)
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The task of the revolutionary is indeed to be violent, but also to avoid the type of violence that is, in fact, merely an impotent passage à l’acte.

Slavoj Zizek | Interview | Divine Violence and Liberated Territories | SOFT TARGETS Journal

I’m not an enormous fan of Zizek to be honest, though I find it interesting that he is facing this question of violence, politics and the act. Here, this curious double-handed way of somehow making the violent rational or understandable is found in the ’indeed…but also’ move of the rhetoric, such that it appears like ’we can all accept that the revolution will involve violence but let’s not allow meaningless violence or violence without the right meaning into our validation of the revolutionary act’. The strange reality of violence is found, however, less in this ’right meaning’ but in the potency of the violence, in the potency of the force of condensation of singularities. Zizek talks in the interview linked to above about the ideas of a ’divine’ violence (citing Walter Benjamin) or a moment of institution that institutes whilst being an exception to that which is instituted (citing Schmitt) but this all and Zizek’s own position itself seems to somehow still be part of a discourse of legitimating violence, even if this takes the route of somehow legitimating its illegitimacy in some curious dance of the paradoxical.

This becomes clearer as Zizek marks his own territory, alongside that rather strange new phenomenon of hailing Badiou as the new theoretician of the left. Zizek says “I agree with what Badiou said in the recent interview with you published in Il Manifesto: “those who have nothing have only their discipline.” This is why I like to mockingly designate myself “Left-fascist” or whatever!” What exactly is it that ’those who have nothing’ have nothing of? Presumably something like power.
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(Working notes, not likely to be accurate but part of the process of working through various thoughts as I continue writing - comments welcome if they bear this in mind.)

It is clear for anyone reading Kant that the priority of principles is central to his thinking. It is the clash between principles and experience which motivates the whole problem of the first Critique, we are told in the opening paragraphs of the ’Preface to the First Edition’(1). The nature of human reason is the problematic tension deriving from the combination of the rational principles and the sensuous experiences that constitute actual thinking. The sensuous experiences ’insure’ the ’truth and sufficiency’ of the principles - not, however, their production. The force of questioning which produces principles as answers or solutions soon finds that it goes far beyond, in its questioning, any solution we might propose. The force of questioning overwhelms the capacity to produce a testable solution. Of course, we might produce what appears as a solution, some abstract untestable principle that offers us a sense of solution to a problem but any real solution principle must needs be capable of being tested to be accepted or ’insured’ against falsehood. It is experience that is the testing ground and thus anything that is in principle beyond experience is untestable. The classic tension of the Kantian system is found in the fact that we can ask unanswerable questions.

Of course, this is not simply a Kantian tension. The very idea of an unanswerable question is, whilst peculiar in itself, something we find at various points within philosophy - for example, there is a strange resonance between the way in which Kant establishes the key productive problem of his transcendental philosophy and the way the verificationists would rule out of court any talk of God or Soul, even though they soon fell foul of the reflective moment which revealed the unverifiable dogmatism of their own central principle. This, perhaps, is not so surprising given the shared model of philosophy as a practice of giving answers which both Kant and the Verificationists possessed. The scandal of a discipline of reason that cannot provide final and definitive answers can be imputed as a motivation to Ayer as easily as Kant.
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(A slightly delayed note on the second Series due to preparations for the Volcanic Lines conference we held last week on Kant and Deleuze, a report of which is over here).

One of the most fascinating lines here in this Series is the following: "For this reason the stoics can oppose destiny and necessity" (LOS:6). A footnote follows which refers to Cicero’s De Fato. A comparison with the Epicureans immediately follows this.

What is crucial, at this point, is the way in which it is the causal relation, the cause-effect couple, which prompts these claims about the conceptualisation of necessity within the Stoics and Epicureans. The reference to Cicero is a peculiarity. I am currently reading Kant’s Logic at the same time as Deleuze’s LOS and a comment Kant makes there about Cicero offers a curious complication to Deleuze’s account. Kant claims that "Cicero was in speculative philosophy a disciple of Plato, in morality a Stoic" (Logic: Introduction, S4; 35). The complication in reading Deleuze seems to be that he is advanced as an example of the Stoic account of necessity, yet precisely in line with Kant’s characterization of him as a ’Stoic in morality’. It is not a logical account of necessity that Deleuze is focussing on, though in later sections he will refer to a notion of ’modality’, but rather the moral dimension of necessity which is tangled into the concept of ’destiny’. We might want to ask whether Deleuze too, like Cicero, might be classed as a Platonic in speculation and a Stoic in morality. There seem at least some who might want to assert just such a claim, at least in part - Badiou, for example, seems to claim a level of Platonism can be found within Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual / actual distinction.

What happens in this 2nd Series of LOS, however, is a kind of philosophical-historical conceptual topography. Deleuze brings to the foreground the concept of the ’event’ which is plainly of central importance to the whole project of LOS. In the first Series he had indicated the role of the ’depth’ of ’mad becoming’ that was incapable of being contained within a model of knowledge. The motor force of the problematic relation to identity is found in what Deleuze names there as the ’paradox of infinite identity’ which is caused by a di-directionality of couples such as cause-effect (LOS:2). The name, that which "is guaranteed by the permanence of savoir", is that which is lost in Alice’s adventures in the realm of becoming. The name is lost within the event and yet the event is communicated through language.
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