Abstract
This episode is part one of one of the lecture series [HTA 15] on Gilles Deleuze’s “Zones of Immanence,” from Two Regimes of Madness_ Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 and on Deleuze’s “Immanence_ A Life” [1995], in Pure Immanence_ Essays on A Life.
Primary Source
Deleuze, Gilles. “Immanence: A Life.” In Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, translated by Anne Boyman, 25–33. New York: Zone Books, 2005 [1995].
Deleuze, Gilles. “Zones of Immanence.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 266–69. Cambridge, MA / London, UK: Semiotext(e), distributed by The MIT Press, 2007 [1995].
Guiding Questions
“Zones of Immanence” [ca. 1975-95] in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995
-
Which historical tradition contrasts with immanence? In other words, what foil does Deleuze start the essay with to help compare against and define immanence?
-
What are the two movements of immanence? How do they relate to the classic problem of the One and the Many? How might the One and the Many relate to the simultaneity we saw in Sartre between first-person freedom/magic and third-person determinism/mechanism? How might this simultaneity result in identity and difference? Do they determine their meanings in relation to one another?
-
How do horizontality and verticality relate to immanence and transcendence?
-
What two ideas form the basis of an expressionist philosophy, according to Deleuze?
-
How does translation demonstrate the simultaneity between the One and the Many, between God and the multiplicity of the World?
-
How does Deleuze’s re-conception of translation (through Gandillac) offer a notion of the world as linguistic, forming the basis of hermeneutical materialism (that sense communicates to us through originary, shared material communion)?
“Immanence: A Life” [1995], in Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life
-
What is A Life?
-
What is the significance of the example from Charles Dickens? Why does everyone lose their sense of self to save the degenerate rogue’s life?
-
Whose perspective is A Life? If we are entangled in strange ways, how does this interact with solipsism? If solipsism is still possible, how would it be multiple?
-
How does Deleuze’s view contrast with the “experience-in-the-brain” model?
-
What active verbs describe how the concepts/notions articulate and express behavior patterns out in the world? Avoid linking verbs when writing on ontology.
-
What is the difference between “a” life and “the” life? This determination into suchness, particularness, thatness, mineness, and as-it-is-ness is called haecceity. Still, how does Deleuze transform the medieval haecceity (with its assumption of transcendence) into the dimension of immanence and actualization? How does this relate to singularities, indices, and abschattungen, i.e., adumbration, in phenomenology?
-
How does “a” life connect from the first instance the unity of beings due to giving primacy to the indefinite article “a”? This indefiniteness is an index rather than a transcendental form “out there,” separate and away from the world.
-
How do immanence and transcendence relate to monism and dualism? How do these relate to the nature of consciousness? How do they describe the production of conscious experience and its necessary preconditions?
-
How might A Life and its accompanying model of consciousness relate to “an answer to the meaning of life” and why we exist in the first place?
-
Does Deleuze replace transcendence with immanence or show how they interrelate? Is one of these two fundamental metaphysical structures subordinate or superior to the other structure? Are they inseparable?