notebookeleven

Continuum publishers have informed me and my co-editor that the collection of essays on Kant and Deleuze we were working on these last few months is to be released next June.  Go to the Continuum website for the details of contributors and a brief blurb…

This news, of course, reminds me that I have been neglecting the blog and intend to start posting notes again soon.  I’ve been deep into Deleuze’s Leibniz book and reading Gasset on Leibniz as well, so have been enfolded in folds and foldings.  Notes to come soon.

First of all here’s the link to Dan Smith’s paper, which I recomend you all read as it has an excellent account of deleuze’s relation to Lebiniz.  Dan is coming to Greenwich in July for the Volcanic Lines conference on Kant and Deleuze.

Secondly here is the link to the animations and basic introduction to the infinitessimal calculus that I showed you in class.  Again, as I said then, I do not endorse anything about the site, I simply think that the animations are useful visual tools.

Report from Volcanic Lines reading group, Monday 22nd January 2007

The essay in question for this session was ‘The Method of Dramatization’, contained in ‘Desert Islands and other texts:1953-1974′; Semiotext 2004:94-116.  I gave a short introduction, not really a paper but simply a set of thoughts and notes intended to begin the discussion…you can find the notes from my introduction and the discussion that followed over here.

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I was reading through Miguel de Beistegui’s ‘Truth and Genesis’ today and noticed this argument, at the beginning of the third section on Deleuze;

Metaphysics is characterised by its emphasis on substance. Modern science, essentially from the development of Quantum theory, has implicitly dumped this Aristotelian ontology in favour of one that is an ‘energetics’. Mathematics is the access route to this ontology. Implicitly, therefore, the ‘new ontology’, of which Deleuze is an instance according to de Beistegui, derives from mathematical insight.

As those who were at the Badiou / Clamour of being reading group will no doubt recognise, this is quite close to the thesis in ‘Being and Event’ that mathematics is ontology.

Now, first of all this is a reconstruction of an argument, not a reading of a text and so I’m not putting this forward as an account of de Beistegui, merely locating the line of argument. I wanted to do so because it struck me today that this emphasis on substance and embrace of mathematics is still highly susceptible to the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics.

For Heidegger, it is not substance ontology istelf that is the problem. Rather, the distortion in substance ontology derives from the emphasis placed on presence (ousia) and this in turn derives from the rise to dominance of a certain attitude of logos, in effect the ’scientific’ attitude, whereby logos becomes the archetypal ‘…logy’ of Being. Originarily, Heidegger argues (in ITM), logos and phusis are entwined intimately as an unconcealment of Being. Language and the physical are both ways in which we come across Being and are, as it were, co-dependent, neither having any priority. With the end of the originary moment of thought it is logos that rises to the surface and through the concept of ‘idea’ begins to establish itself as the court of determination, claiming the capacity to know Being and determine what has and what hasn’t got a claim to Being.

If, then, the argument is that mathematics is the route of access to Being, in effect this claim would need to respond to Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics since it appears initially that it falls inside that which Heidegger critiqued (whether it be Badiou or de Beistegui’s Deleuze). A ’scientific’ or mathematical Deleuze (or Badiou) will still be susceptible to a straight-forward Heideggerian rebuttal. In fact, any philosophy still claiming to be doing onto-logy would be susceptible to this Heideggerian critique on the basis of the fact that this critque aims precisely at the …logy aspect of the argument, its sense of possessing ‘right knowledge’ or being a ’science of Being’.

Anyway, just a thought…

(If you want to comment, please do so over at the Volcanic Lines discussion blog where this was posted)