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‘either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has
nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.’ (Deleuze
2004: 169)
Before we get to the problem of ethics, however, it is necessary to
comprehend Deleuze’s repeated suggestion that events are only effects
(Deleuze 2004: 10, 29, 241). How then, can an event be said to
be an effect? According to Deleuze, the reversals in Lewis Carroll’s
Alice books give us some kind of indication. There, characters are
punished before having done anything wrong, or they cry before pricking
themselves (Deleuze 2004: 5). Now, there may be empirical explanations
for such behaviour, but these are not of the order of the event. To
focus upon them would leave what he calls the expressive aspect of
the event untouched, which does not obey the logic of anticipation,
rational reconstruction, and prediction. Empirical explanations fail to
see that what has occurred is never wounding because of any particular
actuality, whatever it may be, but that we are wounded because of
the prospect of worse ‘to come’ or because of the relation that any
given actuality bears to the complex of temporal syntheses that is our
past, noting that this memorial past synthesises from passing moments a
form that never existed before that operation (Roffe 2002). As such,
it is the future and the past that wound us; that is the time of the
event. According to Deleuze—prior to the later influence of Guattari—
psychoanalytic explanations were capable of understanding this and
thus promised to provide the science of the event (Deleuze 2004:
242–3). And it is easy to see why he might have been impressed with
psychoanalysis. Despite Freud’s scientific pretensions, psychoanalysis
need not require an actually occurring, actually wounding, primal scene
to which the child and adult subsequently adjust. This is partly why
Karl Popper famously calls it unfalsifiable, and, without buying into a
Popperian objectivism, we will consider here the philosophical efficacy of
the particular techniques of transcendental argumentation that Deleuze
employs. While Deleuze calls into question the normalising tendency he
finds at the heart of psychoanalysis – hence his positive discussion of the
‘perverse’ structure towards the end of Logic of Sense (Deleuze 2004:
280–1, 341) – for him psychoanalysis nonetheless managed to grasp the
event as an effect, and one that does not simply follow from any single
cause, or from a concatenation of actual causes constituting any given
state of affairs.
This is because, for Deleuze, the event is subject to a double causality
(a double structure), one aspect of which involves a mixture of bodies
and states of affairs (e.g. empirical causes), the other aspect being the
150 Jack Reynolds
become the offspring of one’s events, not of one’s actions. One must
become the offspring of the virtual intensities that subsist in oneself,
which is another way of saying that one must express the wound and
make it the quasi-cause of one’s life. Now this cannot mean to become
the offspring of one’s emotions or passions, or even to intensify one’s
emotions and passions. After all, emotions are, for Deleuze, bound
to a subject, and considered to be of the order of a state of affairs
rather than of the order of the event (Deleuze 2004: 7). It is difficult
to pinpoint positively what his ethics might involve, but it seems to
require the recognition that we are all traversed by some kind of
fault-line (a virtual, impersonal intensity) that is supra-individual and
not confined to the realms of bodies and states of affairs. Whether
this faultline or wound can be distinctive for each of us or ultimately
partakes in one transcendental wound is not clear, but it is the concept
of counter-actualisation that he uses to more fully describe what is
involved in the appropriate manner of giving body to an incorporeal
event-effect.
In describing his ethic of counter-actualisation, Deleuze suggests that
each time the event is inscribed in the flesh, ‘we must double this
painful actualisation by a counter-actualisation which limits, moves
and transfigures it’ (Deleuze 2004: 182). Inscribing the event in the
flesh (in the realm of bodies and habits) is hence necessary for
the sage and for ethics, but it is not the key aspect of his ethic
(Deleuze 2004: 192). Rather, it is the potentialities of that actuality that
are expressed, not merely the literal re-inscription of the same (Williams
1997: 232–46). Not pathological repetition, then, but repetition with
a difference. Counter-actualisation must ‘limit, move, transfigure’ and
mime that which effectively occurs. While the event is brought about by
the living present, by bodies, states of affairs and reason, its eternal truth
is irreducible to them (Deleuze 2004: 182). The event may be the result of
the actions and passion of bodies, but his ethics affirms its irreducibility
to these origins, done by linking it to a transcendental quasi-cause
(wound, Aion, virtual, etc.) rather than to the empirical cause (Deleuze
2004: 109). This is an ethics of the mime and of acting. Sensations and
intensities can be extended beyond the singular through the expressive
and dramatic practices of counter-actualisation. For Deleuze, it is ‘the
free man, who grasps the event, and does not allow it to be actualised
as such without enacting, the actor, its counter-actualisation’ (Deleuze
2004: 173). This counter-actualisation involves a delicate operation, in
that we need to limit ourselves to the counter-actualisation of an event
(and thus embrace our wounding virtual-effect) without allowing the full
Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event 155
actualisation of this wound that characterises the victim and the patient
(Deleuze 2004: 179).
For Deleuze and Bousquet alike, the wound exists before us, before
any particular subject or individuality, and yet we are born to embody
it, thus ‘becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us’
(Deleuze 2004: 169). Again, it is difficult to understand precisely what
this means, but we know what it does not mean. We should not be
indifferently resigned to whatever happens to us, as in the commonly
received understanding of Stoicism, and it is also important to note
Deleuze’s second and inverse warning: ‘counter-actualisation is nothing,
it belongs to a buffoon when it operates alone and pretends to have
the value of what could have happened. But to be the mime of
what effectively occurs . . . is to give the truth of the event the only
chance of not being confused with its inevitable actualisation’ (Deleuze
2004: 182). There are then, two main ways of misunderstanding
and mistakenly living his ethics of counter-actualisation: assenting
to whatever actually happens indifferently and with resignation, or
flippantly miming other possibilities that bear no effective relation to
what happens. No prescription can tell us how to accomplish this, but
we can see that counter-actualisation endeavours to achieve that most
paradoxical of things: to express and even illicitly embody the virtual,
to feel that time-which-is-not. If the present (Chronos) measures the
temporal realisation of an event, and the way in which the wound is
covered over and incorporated into a state of affairs (Deleuze 2004:
73), counter-actualisation depends upon maintaining a relation to time
that opens itself to the immemorial past (that past that defies conscious
memorial reconstruction) and the future that is to come, a time that
retreats and advances, divides endlessly into a proximate past and an
imminent future. This is the time of Aion, the wound.
How can an ethics be based on time, and on the aspect of an event that
never actually occurs but is understood as something within that which
occurs, and which is also said to be both always already passed and
yet to come? In one respect Deleuze is simply following in the footsteps
of Nietzsche. What Nietzsche diagnoses as ressentiment (disgust for life
that trades in negativity) is a revenge against the fact that time passes.
The major form of this ressentiment results from artificially delimiting
time and insisting upon the priority of the present. From the perspective
of some particular present, we might rail against suffering and injustices,
whether they be anticipated or endured. The problem with this attitude,
however, is that it treats the wound-event as somehow wholly outside of
us. This is the reverse of what Deleuzian counter-actualisation aims to
156 Jack Reynolds
achieve. It wants the wound to give birth to us, but not to be the same
as us. Deleuze insists that there is no other ill-will than ressentiment of
the event, and, given that we also know that for him the truth of the
event is Aion (Deleuze 2004: 166, 182), we can conclude that there is no
other ill-will than ressentiment of Aion. For counter-actualisation to be
successful, although it cannot simply return to the virtual, it must both
show the manner in which the virtual and the time of Aion breathe life
into that which occurs, as well as simultaneously allow this to happen.
This is the tension between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, the descriptive
and the normative that Deleuze’s philosophy negotiates and sometimes
conflates. What does that mean for the role of the present, for Chronos,
for bodies, states of affairs (including empirical wounds and suffering),
and even for Reason, which Deleuze also suggests is a being of the
present? (Deleuze 2004: 74). They are all insufficient for an ethics, and
his point is not merely that some kind of dialectical relation with an
ethics of Aion needs to be recognised, in order to balance or moderate
the monopoly that an ethics of Chronos has hitherto enjoyed. Rather,
his point is once again both transcendental and normative: the time of
Aion and the virtual are the condition for the event, and from them he
also derives what is arguably the governing normative principle of his
work: counter-actualisation.
The important question then becomes the following: can a
transcendental condition also entail a normative principle, even one
as opaque as this ethic of counter-actualisation? For Deleuze, the
transcendental needs to provide the conditions for real experience. If
we grant for a moment that his philosophy accomplishes this in its
descriptions of the molecular, difference-in-itself, the virtual, the Aionic
aspect of time, etc., in what sense does an ethics of counter-actualisation
follow from this? It is not clear that it does. Nor is it clear why Aion
and the truth of the event need to be understood as ‘independent of
all matter’. One would have thought that the transcendental condition,
the realm of the virtual, is never wholly independent of matter; indeed,
by Deleuze’s own lights (as evinced by the concept of reciprocal
determination in Difference and Repetition), it is not.12 Does this
independence of matter, this ‘secret dualism’ of Logic of Sense, wherein
Aion and the event are privileged, simply reproduce itself at a moral
level, with a moral hierarchy? It seems to me that it does. If so, this
is philosophically problematic in itself, but there are also reasons to
question this ethic in its own right. Because it parallels the movement of
the quasi-cause and is associated with the virtual, an ethics of counter-
actualisation necessarily resists the imposition of any form of criteria.
Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event 157
Deleuze, it is nonetheless the case that the force for this change
comes from the virtual, Aion, the time which is not. In this respect,
Deleuze’s transcendental philosophy of time, and his associated ethics,
subtly disparage the imperfect corporeal scarification and mediation
that is always already at work.16 To see how this is so, it is worth
briefly considering Deleuze’s detailed treatment of the virtual/actual
distinction in Bergsonism. Deleuze directly confronts the question of
whether Bergson’s position amounts to a dualism or a monism, and
in describing Bergson’s methodological strategy of division he also
makes an observation that seems to bear crucially upon his own modus
operandi. Deleuze states that:
Deleuze adds:
[F]rom everything that a subject may live, from its own body, from
other bodies and objects distinct from it, and from the state of affairs or
Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event 161
References
Badiou, Alain (1999) Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, trans. Louise Burchill,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Badiou, Alain (2007) ‘The Event in Deleuze’, trans. Jon Roffe, Parrhesia: A Journal
of Critical Philosophy, 2, pp. 37–44.
Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event 163
Notes
1. This essay has benefited from the assistance of Jon Roffe, the Deleuze Studies
referees and editorial team, and the Australian Research Council.
2. Cf. Reynolds and Roffe 2006.
3. These terms are also used in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:
262).
4. Cf. Hallward 2006.
5. This is not to dispute his famously opaque concept of transcendental empiricism,
found largely in Difference and Repetition, which purports to allow one to
discern the conditions for actual rather than merely possible experience. There
is clearly a relation between the orders of the virtual and the actual, as well as
something about each that necessarily resists the other. My main concern in this
paper, however, is with the manner in which a dualist evaluative scheme makes
possible his ethics. On this interpretation, transcendental empiricism is really
an attempt to foreground the significance of the virtual and the transcendental
(and their expressive ‘quasi-causality’) so that we don’t have an all-encompassing
realm of brute empiricism/physicalism, which Deleuze refers to as involving
merely ‘bare repetition’.
6. Cf. Williams 2006.
7. In Out of this World, Peter Hallward suggests that they ultimately conflate into a
monistic univocity, precisely because what I label the transcendental component
of the distinction, that which does not refer to l’actualite, is in fact ultimately
all that there is. Deleuze, however, consistently speaks of a ‘secret dualism’ in
Logic of Sense, with, as we have seen, the body and states of affairs the lesser but
arguably not entirely effaced term of the dualism. I return to this question below,
but it revolves around the extent to which Deleuze is read as a Bergsonian, since
for Bergson, at least on Deleuze’s account, we might understand the actual as
but a tendency of the virtual. Hallward and Alain Badiou interpret Deleuze
and Bergson’s positions as very closely related, but it needs to be noted that
Deleuze’s understanding of the virtual is not exactly synonymous with Bergson’s
– Bergson’s conception focuses upon the past and memory, but Deleuze adds a
complicated account of the futural synthesis of time to the equation, especially
in Difference and Repetition.
8. He complicates this account towards the end of Logic of Sense in the series titled
‘Aion’, where he details the different modalities of the present and instant that
are characteristic of Aion and Chronos. Adequately addressing this material,
Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event 165
which is in tension with some of the other formulations in his book, is beyond
us here.
9. This term is taken from Heidegger’s Being and Time and highlights the privilege
it initially accords to the ‘ready-to-hand’, to the pragmatic and ‘equipmental’
relation to place and objects.
10. Cf. Smith 2007. Smith’s admirably clear and precise essay encapsulates a certain
thrust of Deleuze’s ethics, but it has relatively little to say about the extra-worldly
ethic of Logic of Sense. In the course of a discussion of Primo Levi’s life and
work, Ian Buchanan’s Deleuzism (2000: 77–87) offers an interesting analysis of
the link between counter-actualisation and concept creation, something I have
not been able to explore here.
11. In fact, Nietzsche propounds competing and perhaps mutually exclusive
interpretations of the eternal return, suggesting in The Gay Science that
there would be ‘nothing new in it’, seemingly resisting Deleuze’s conviction
that we ought to understanding it as being concerned with the eternal return
of difference rather than sameness (Nietzsche 2001: 341).
12. Cf. Williams 2005: 89–105.
13. Consider the central role that time plays in Merleau-Ponty’s (1994: 345–6)
famous account of ambiguity in Phenomenology of Perception, and the manner
in which it breaches what has been considered to be inner and outer. The
philosophy of ambiguity is a philosophy of the scar. Cf. Reynolds 2006.
14. While there is no single ethical and political position that we can attribute to
phenomenological philosophers and to post-structuralist philosophers, certain
tendencies can nonetheless be associated with each of them. Phenomenologists
tend to be more communitarian in outlook, emphasising the role of ethos
in the constitution of individual moral agents – consider the work of ‘neo-
phenomenologists’ like Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, and Paul Ricoeur, along
with the early explicit critiques of liberalism advanced by Merleau-Ponty and de
Beauvoir. They are essentially communitarian in their focus upon the difficulties
inherent in liberalism’s atomistic conception of the subject; they will not accept
the supposition of a rational disengaged agent, even as a regulative ideal. If
the ethical model par excellence for most phenomenologists is something like
phronesis (and a kind of virtue ethics), this is not the case for poststructuralists
for reasons related to their philosophies of time, their denunciation of habit,
skills, gathering, and their consistently radical politics of the new and the
different.
15. Gallagher’s paper makes it apparent that phenomenological phronesis is
generally rejected by poststructuralist thinkers (as in Derrida and Deleuze,
where it is understood to be common sense), or inadequately thematised, as
Gallagher suggests is the case with Lyotard. It seems to me that Gallagher is
right that there is a tacit denial of the importance of phronesis (or Gadamerian
Verstehen), habits, ethos over time, and that these are replaced by a priority
given to inventing new moves, new games, particularly in the case of Lyotard
and Deleuze. While they know that the creating of new games is never ex nihilo,
they assert there is a temporal priority given to a particular futural synthesis of
time that for them is exemplified by motifs like the dice-throw, the child, etc.
16. Of course, many objections might be raised against this interpretation, and
the resources for which can be found in some of the many reflections in the
Deleuzian secondary literature on the related issue of difference/identity. See, for
example: Williams 2003; Williams 2006; May 1999; and Smith 2003. Smith’s
eloquent defence of Deleuze against Badiou, however, does not invalidate my
position here. Firstly, my interpretation of Deleuze is certainly not that he is a
vitalist (as Badiou suggests in The Clamour of Being); on the contrary, Deleuze’s
166 Jack Reynolds
ethics is one of the inorganic. Second, to the extent that the nomad/royal
science distinction Smith is concerned with maps onto the distinctions discussed
here, both Deleuze and Smith prioritise differentiation (problems, virtual) over
differenciation (dynamisms, actual solutions) and hence nothing necessarily
contravenes my account. While the impetus behind such a prioritisation is
arguably the hope of somehow reinvigorating the actual, it is again the case
that the ethical imperative for this derives from the fundamental hierarchical
differentiation of the virtual and the actual.
17. Deleuze (1988: 105) also accepts the preferability of a ‘finalism’ in which
the living being is somehow non-analogically compared to the whole of the
universe. But perhaps the clearest example of this mysticism in Deleuze’s work,
however, occurs in his essay ‘Michel Tournier and the World Without Others’,
an appendix to Logic of Sense, but written much earlier. I analyse this intriguing
essay in Reynolds 2008.
18. Some similar observations regarding the wound also feature in Pure Immanence:
‘The wound is incarnated or actualised in a state of things or in lived experience:
but it is itself a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence’ (Deleuze 2001: 31).
Establishing precisely what the relationship is between the virtual and the plane
of immanence is, however, beyond me here.
DOI: 10.3366/E1750224108000056