Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Sense (with Nathan Widder)

[MUSIC] >> You're listening to Hotel Bar sessions. The podcast where three philosophers sit down at the end of a long conference day to chop it up at the hotel bar, which, as we all know, is where the real philosophy happens. Welcome back listeners to another episode of Hotel Bar sessions. My name is Lee Johnson, and as usual, I am joined by my fabulous co-hosts Bob Valleere and Jen Kling. And today, we also have a special guest with us, Nathan Witter, to talk about delus and sense. But before we get to that, we're going to get some drink orders, find out what everybody's either cheering or jeering today. So Jen, let me go to you first. >> So tonight, I am going to have a hard ginger beer, which I just discovered existed. I did not know this was a drink, but apparently it's really popular in Australia, and it is delicious, and nice and refreshing for a hot summer. And today, I am cheering the people of Colorado. [MUSIC] Because we are on fire out here, everybody is stepping up and doing their part. Nobody's lighting any fires. We've canceled all the fireworks celebrations, and everybody is helping everybody else out. And I think that's really amazing. >> Yeah, that's a real mess you got out there. >> But we're working through it. Bob, what about you? >> Well, today, I'd like to have a PIMS cup, because we just got over a heat wave, and we're getting ready for another one. So I need to stay cool. And PIMS cup also has a cucumber in it, and I like a cucumber in my drink. Today, I want to cheer two teams in the World Cup, recording this on the eve of the round of 16. So we've had the first knockout round. And two teams in particular, Morocco and Paraguay, deserve a special round of applause for knocking out the Netherlands and Germany. [APPLAUSE] It's unfortunate for me because I had the Netherlands in my bracket, but it's a well, and they won on penalty kicks, which is a terrible way to win. But of course, it is totally appropriate that two of the first three games in the United States should end on a shootout. [LAUGH] >> Oof. I'll see you have a guest there with you. Why don't you introduce him? >> Well, this is Nathan Whitter, who was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, where he was supervised by the great political theorist William Connelly. And then he got his PhD in Essex. He bugged out to get his PhD at Essex with Ernesto LaClau, focusing on genealogies of difference, exploring ancient and modern notions of difference, read through a Nietzschean lens, I guess you could say. And since then, he's been teaching at Royal Holloway University outside of London. And he's just got a new book out, which is why he's here. It's called Deloza and the Concept of Sense. And he's also published a few other books on the genealogies of difference, reflections on time and politics, and political theory after Deloza. But this new book of his is a major contribution to Deloza's scholarship, not least, because it purports to present a systematic reading of Deloza and the entirety of his work, solo work, I should point out. And key figures in the history of philosophy in relation to the concept of sense. So Nathan, welcome to the bar. >> Thank you. Would you like to order a drink? >> Yeah, I'm afraid I'm really boring when it comes to drinks. I just want a nice, I've stamped in an tonic so I can keep cool. And so I can cheer. I don't know whether to cheer, I think I need to cheer because I woke up this morning and I heard this news which just made me cheer. So as you may know in England, we're in the process of replacing our prime ministers. We had a prime minister, Kier Starmer, who brought labor back into power after 14 years out of power and in the last two years has managed to lose any kind of sympathy or support he had from all across the country. And he's kind of been a rather humiliating way being replaced by Andy Bernamore's destined to be replaced. He hasn't formally happened yet. But news has come out this morning that at the height of the Donald Trump terror wars from last year, the British government came to an agreement where we would spend huge amounts of money. Volunteered huge amounts of money to buy American pharmaceuticals for the NHS in exchange for avoiding tariffs. And this was kind of rammed through parliament without any debate using special procedures. But this morning, it finally came out how much money this is going to cost. It just 45 billion pounds as close to 60 billion US dollars. No one knows how to pay for it. It's going to be the responsibility of the next prime minister for his empty Andy Bernam but no one really knows. And so not only is Kier Starmer leaving with one of the lowest popularity ratings imaginable, but he's leaving a big stinking pile of financial poop for his etc. Oh no. You can say shit. Okay, we can say shit. Yep. Okay. Well, you know, the joke in Europe is that Mark Aruta, who's the chief of NATO, has his head so far up, Trump's ass that he can see Kier Starmer's feet. Oh my gosh. On that cheery note, Lee, what are you drinking? You know what? It is so hot. I know that's what everyone is saying, but I think I'm just going to order literally a full glass of ice and just hope that in the time it takes the bartender to bring it to me that it's not a lukewarm glass of water by that time, which it probably will be fair. I am also jeering today and because we are recording this right on the eve of the 4th of July, I want to jeer about our national anthem. [blows] [blows] [blows] I think it's time to replace it. It's a terrible, terrible national anthem. It's long. It's hard to sing. It's meandering. It takes too long to get to the point. And even when it finally builds up to the kind of apex of the song, the "Lend of the Free" in the home of the brave, that itself is only a clause in a sentence which is like, "Oh, hey, can you still see the flag?" And I just don't think this is a good national anthem. I have some ideas about what we can maybe replace it with. We'd be happy to hear from our listeners if you've got good ideas about what to replace the national anthem with. So that's my jeer for today. So Bob, Nathan is your guest and we're really glad to have him here with us at the bar and to talk to him about his book today. So why don't you set this conversation up for us? Okay. Well, you know, Deluz is one of those more contemporary thinkers in the latter half of the 20th century. People know his name, but they don't know much about him. And Nathan's new book could really change that because it does give this sort of systematic approach to reading Deluz. People might be familiar with him because of his work on film. They might also know his collaborative work that he did with Felix Guatari, such as anti-Edit piss and a thousand plateaus. Those are exceptionally challenging works, but his own work, his own solo monograph work is idiosyncratic and demands not only careful attention, but also really exceptional knowledge of the figures he interrogates, including Kant, whom he considers an enemy, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Bergson. For him, philosophy is the invention of concepts. And to a certain extent like Heidegger, he invents many of his concepts through a careful and systematic reading of these key figures. And his inventions do not limit their origins to texts in the history of philosophy. He also draws from anthropology, linguistics, geology, and film among other disciplines. So he's difficult and he's diverse. Most people, when they start to approach Deluz, they do so by reading one of his books on another author. For me, it was his book on Nietzsche because I was really into Nietzsche at the time, and that was the only book of his that was translated. So it was easy. But they approach him through another author, and perhaps because of this, they often find it difficult to find a stable foothold from which to survey the whole of his work and understand its trajectory. And there's really not very many secondary sources that attempt to do this in a conceptual way. Most argue that he is and always has been a Bergsonian or a Nietzschean or a spinazist. But happily, Nathan's new book provides a corrective to that trend. For him, Nathan, the concept of sense is the guiding thread that runs through all of Deluz's readings in the history of philosophy and his two big monographs, difference in repetition and the logic of sense, that more or less give sense to the adjective delusion. So today, we're going to try to make sense of sense in Deluz, and if we're lucky, arrive at a better sense of this difficult thinker. Listeners, put your machines down, set down some roots, pull up a chair, let's talk about Deluz. Here's a thing about a bar conversation. It's never really over when the tab gets closed. You walk out, you're still turning over ideas, you're still wanting to push back on something someone said, still thinking about the question nobody quite answered. That's the energy we're trying to carry over onto social media. we would love for you to follow along. Hoto Bar Sessions is on Facebook, YouTube, Blue Sky, TikTok, and Instagram. So follow us on whichever of those you actually use, and you'll get episode updates, conversation threads, the occasional philosophical provocation, and more importantly a community of people who think this stuff is worth talking about. Because it is. So come find us and hit follow, because the philosophical happy hour runs all week. You just have to know where to look. So I suppose we should probably begin by figuring out what sense means. You know, delus was French and in French, sense can mean a lot of different things. And that doesn't make sense, which already invites us to differentiate sense and meaning. The Germans would call Zinn in Bedouyton. And that's preoccupied philosophers throughout the 20th century, philosophers from both sides of the analytic and continental divide. But of course, sense can also have an effective dimension. It refers to the five senses. And so to sensibility and sensation, to perception and to feeling. And to make matters worse in Paris, if you're walking down a street, you might see a sign that says, "Sons unique," which means one way street. Traffic flows in one direction. And in some cases, so too does meaning. So that suggests an absence of ambiguity. A "Sons unique" is also a unique meaning. So I guess our first question then is what exactly does delus mean by sense? And how is it related to or different from these other meanings that are common in his native language, French? That's a really interesting, a very broad question. The short answer is it's all of those combined. And maybe a good way to explain this and explain the book project a little bit. It tries to trace delus's thinking up to the beginnings of his collaborations with Bautari. So basically the first half of his works, which are all solo works. He's heavily engaged in readings of figures in the history of philosophy and then his writings in this period culminate with these two works of original philosophy or what he says is writing in his own words, which are difference in repetition and the logic of sense. And the reason I think sense is such a key term for delus goes back to one of his earliest acknowledged publications. He has some publications from his early 20s that he disowned, but one of the first ones that he didn't disown is a review of Jean Hippolite's logic and existence, L'Ochea existence. People it was a Hegelian thinker. He was the translator of Hegel's phenomenology and de France. He wrote this huge tube on the genesis and structure of Hegel's phenomenology. And he wrote this much smaller book, logic and existence. And he was Delus's teacher. He was one of the things to lose rights at one point in a letter. He says that what he detested most in the history of philosophy and he says he was one of the members of the last generation to be beaten over the head with the history of philosophy as a student was Hegelian dialectics. That's what he hated the most. The thesis in Hippolite's book is that Hegel's philosophy is a philosophy of sense. And by that, and part of me is not a philosophy of essence, Hegel gets rid of that whole search for essence and linking truth to essence. But he performs it in such a way that we don't simply replace essence with appearance. So sense isn't just the appearance of things. Sense is a unity of differences or a unity of opposites. And so what Bob mentioned about sense referring to both meaning and to sensations to the five senses, there's a passage in Hegel that Hippolite quotes at length where he talks about this wonderful word sense that it one speaks to the universal in the form of meaning, but also to the particular in the form of physical sensibility and that it combines both of these together dialectically. And you could add to that direction. And I think Duluth always is playing with that as well, that's sense as direction. Hippolite's reading of Hegel centers on this whole idea that Hegel understands philosophy in terms of a philosophy that reaches the absolute or the unconditioned as being a philosophy of sense that kind of gathers together all of the possible oppositions so that there's nothing that remains outside it. As something ineffable or unknowable or unconceptualizable, we reach what Hegel refers to as the absolute idea. So meaning then is sort of unfolding through this dialectical process, which is moving in a certain direction. Yeah. Exactly. And so the dialect is also therefore developmental. Now the thing with that also which is key to Hippolite's reading is that sense comes from nonsense. So Hegel distinguishes between our natural way of understanding things which does not admit of opposition and a philosophical way of thinking which holds together oppositions. So Hegel of course famously opens the logic for example and so I'll send the phenomenology, this discussion of being and nothing. So how would we define being in everyday language we would say that being is not nothing and nothing is not being that they're irreconcilably opposed and the dialectical answer to that is being is nothing and nothing is being one becomes the other and so becoming is the term that holds together both being and nothing and that's the mediation and sublation of this opposition. For Hegel himself, sense comes out of this nonsense, this nonsense of contradiction and it delus is looking for a different way in which sense comes out of nonsense which he poses as difference rather than contradiction. His early philosophies all about trying to articulate a notion of difference that is different from opposition. So then the motor of the concept of sense is difference and it's through differentiation that this dialectical process moves. It's through this dialectical process that there is something like meaning and that's the direction. So it involves all of these different things except so far for feeling or perception. So he hasn't unified all of the different senses of sense yet together. Well, we have to get to that. For Hegel, of course, we reach the absolute idea. We also account for the concrete and not just the universal. So we account for the meaning of history, for example, meaning of concrete human history. Again, Duluth doesn't want to say that this is a progression that's a dialectical one. I think Duluth is a thinker of the absolute but he wants to develop an absolute of difference rather than contradiction. Therefore an absolute that doesn't revolve around identity. This is the great kind of 60s French post-structural critique of Hegel of representational thought which is that difference has always been understood in relation to identity. Philosophy is always linked truth to identity. It's always linked to absolute identity. It's a theological conception in many regards of knowledge and truth as well. I'm not jumping here really quick Nathan. I want to go back to these three senses of sense that you mentioned. So sense in the sense of meaningfulness, in the sense of affective or sensory affects, and then also in the sense of direction. Because I wonder if it's the third sense, the sense of direction that is offering something that might be helpful for me. And I'm going to presume also for our listeners in trying to sort of frame what exactly is the problem that Duluth is trying to solve. Because if sense is a one-way street, if it moves in one direction, if flows in one direction, that does seem to imply that there is some source that it flows from. And I know that you've been explaining sort of Hegel's account of that. But I'm wondering just quite straightforwardly, is this the problem that Duluth is trying to solve? Where does sense come from? If it can't come from somewhere outside the world? Yeah. Again, this is Hegel's reading of Hegel. This ties up with another way in which that book is really foundational for Duluths, and to review of the book is foundational for Duluths, which is that Hegelied reads Hegel as a thinker who's seeking to achieve imminence, right? So that there is no second world, there's no world of forms or ideas or any other kind of world outside of our own. The philosophy of sense gets rid of, or an ontology of sense actually, it's the way Hegelied puts it, gets rid of any references to some transcendent or unknowable. Something upon which our knowledge and our sense and our understanding depend. And then just to return to one point on Duluths, in particular, one of the ways which Duluths tries to think around this in a non-hegelian way is to say sense does not work in one direction that senses by valent. The nonsense that produces sense is characterized by always moving in two directions at once. Within his early work, that really reaches its best articulation in the logic of sense, where Duluths engages quite a lot with Lewis Carroll's work with Alice in Wonderland and through the looking glass. And these ideas that Alice is growing larger and Alice is growing smaller, he ties us to Plato's notion of pure becoming, which you can find in the parmenides and the idea that as something is growing older than itself, it is also becoming younger than itself. And all of these kinds of bidirectional becomings are happening in the parmenides. So just to follow up then on Lee's question, this is really helpful for me to think about this through the lens of Alice in Wonderland, that's a text I'm more familiar with. Is the notion then that sense is simultaneously contained in this world, so sense always comes from itself in this world, but also is not contained in the sense that we are in the sense that in the way that we are always making sense out of the nonsense that surrounds us, is that the notion? Yeah, I think one thesis in here is that the everyday sense that we have is not by directional paradoxical sense. Again, one of the many things to do is trying to do with his own philosophy of sense is provide a kind of critique of representational thought. It has a kind of parallel with the early Heidegger with being in time. Heidegger has this notion of a vulgar conception of time, which he doesn't so much want to get rid of in this sense, like you can't have it anymore, but he wants to give it his ontological place, like to show that it's not foundational, to show that time is something broader than that. I had an argument with a colleague of mine ages ago on Aristotle's conception of time and he was in what use is Aristotle's conception of time, and I said, "Well, you wouldn't know who won a race if you didn't have Aristotle's conception of time." "Duh, it has a use." And it's similar to representation. And, you know, D'Luez doesn't say representation doesn't exist. He doesn't say that it doesn't have any use, that it doesn't have any value. We couldn't navigate the world without it, but it's not foundational. And when you're, you know, employing it, you're employing something in a way epiphenomenal, right, or superficial. The way he will try to explain this in difference or repetition is that representations place is as a site of transcendental illusions. Identity, he says, is a transcendental illusion. And by that, he simply means the things that we think of as solid and stable and having definition is not like they don't really appear that way, but that's not actually what they are. You could think of it as, yes, much more of a dynamic sense of the physical world, as well as the way which concepts work and are created, but that dynamism also gives the appearance of stabilities. So what's the difference between what you're calling or what D'Luez calls transcendental illusions? That are meaningful to us and are everyday normal lives. What's the difference between that sense of sense kind of put in its proper place, corralled in a way as a transcendental illusion? What's the difference between that and nonsense? So nonsense is not the absence of sense. Okay. It's not just the meaningless. It's that from which these different senses emerge. And the way in which D'Luez and philosophy will develop in these books up to his meaning with Quattari, and I think that sense is really crucial for understanding all of D'Luez's work, but that language of sense actually drops out when he starts working with Quattari. So this study that I have here, it just gestures towards that. That nonsense in many respects is what allows us to invent new senses. And there's an ethics to that he talks about. There are meanings that seem to be given in our world, but there's no necessity to them. He gives us a great example in the logic of sense, which is Jobuske, who is this soldier from World War I, who became a paraplegic. He suffered this catastrophic injury. And that injury became the starting point for this body of work. And he turned his injuries into something, you know, it didn't mean the end of his life. So he found this way of, in a sense, changing the meaning. D'Luez has this reference to the Stoics in the logic of sense. He also says a lot of time not only engaging with Alice in Wonderland, but probably even more with stoic philosophy. He talks about the Stoics have this distinction between destiny and necessity. There's a necessity at the realm that they say of physical causes. Buske had to become a paraplegic once that injury took place. But the meaning is open. And the term he is is effectuation that's the verb use is gets transiting is actualization, which is quite misleading in the English translation. So I was say, effectuation said that sense has to be understood as effectuated and counter-effectuated in bodies and in realities and in our physical world and how we sense our physical world. What Buske achieves is a counter-effectuation and therefore change in the meaning of his injury. It's not just the end of his life. Hey dear listeners, you know, producing this podcast is a work of love. But at the end of the season when we get the bar tab, there are some costs we have to pay. I mean, we have to tip the bar man and we have to tip out the bar staff. Not really, I'm kidding. There are some production costs. So if you like what we do and want to support us, why don't you please head over to patreon.com and find us at hotel bar sessions and consider making a donation. All of your support is most welcome and greatly appreciated. So Nathan, I really like this example you give us of the paraplegic. I'm interested in whether the paraplegic creates meaning out of the nonsense that has happened to him or whether he changes the meaning. The reason I'm asking that question is because if he's changing the meaning, it suggests that meaning is there, it is under-adgencial control in some way, contrasted with if he makes meaning out of what has occurred to him, then it seems like Delus has more of an existentialist picture. It's also possible I'm just grasping for related concepts to help me make sense of this. It's not made, if by existentialist you mean that kind of sartory notion of the radical will from existentialism and humanism that you could just change your meaning at will. And again, that's why I said, Delus links all of this up to a question of ethics. And it's an ethics of the self, you could say, in that Fukotean sense of the term. It's an ethics that in many ways comes from in the middle, you're already there. So you're not creating from nothing, you're creating from what's there. The way in which Delus speaks about it is the meanings of anything that happens are by-valent. They have multiple meanings, they have by-valent meanings, they go in two directions at once, they don't have a single sense. And Kevin says that Delus is not interested in the second world and so forth, he puts it in terms of a kind of idealism, like what is the place of ideas in relation to physicality. But the effectuation of an event onto the body, this is the way he presents it, gives it a specific meaning, a representational meaning. So yeah, maybe just answer your question directly. The meanings are already there. And there is a way of changing it. There's an agency, Delus isn't a thinker, he doesn't endorse ideas of the subject of any kind of Cartesian subject or a Higalian subject, much of what he argues is we have to think of agency at a presubjective level. But that doesn't mean it isn't lived and it doesn't occur in people, in people who achieve a subjectivity. The question is in a world that doesn't have subjects, how do we achieve subjectivity in a world of agencies that occur below or outside the realm of consciousness, how do we achieve something to terminate. So I think a lot of that is what's going on when he talks about how it is that individuals and he doesn't just think about this by the way in his individuals, there are collectivities, there are groups that achieve changes as groups that become different than they are. And that in becoming different than they are and becoming other to what they are, they change the sense of things as it's realized or expressed or effectuated. So yeah, Busque is an example at an individual level, but there are political, social, cultural, other movements collectively that become different as well. This is the idea of multiplicity in delus. This is one of his key terms, delusion multiplicities. Everything has many folds, it's multiple. So in the concept of sense, there is a kind of multiplicity that could describe with a number of weird adjectives, like it's burbling or gargling constantly, it's dynamic and it risks becoming a concretion, which then would be a transcendental illusion. So you said earlier the concept of identity is a transcendental illusion. So that's when all of this dynamism, all of this burbling and gargling of the multiplicity of imminence has concreted, become stabilized, become empty, become dead in some ways. And this is very closely related to in phenomenology, this notion of institution that we see in Hussarro and in Meleponte. So this is the sense of sense then. This is the concept of sense is that you have this sort of imminence of all sorts of different factors that are interacting, intersecting, external events could disrupt them, could rearrange them, could necessitate that you have to live your life differently because of that. But there's always this risk that they become solidified and no longer provide the dynamic multiplicity that you need in order to live, right? Yeah. And in order to think, I mean, so difference in repetition has this whole discussion around thinking and how does it occur, where does it come from? It begins with the critique of the day card. It's not simply that I think therefore I am. And also in a way, a critique of Kant who says that, you know, our knowledge begins with experience, but it doesn't all arise from experience. Duluth says that our thinking arises from an encounter. It's an encounter with something in the world that we can't recognize, we can't represent to ourselves, we can't define, but we can sense. It can be an encounter within the every day, but it somehow has the capacity to shake or to jolt or to transform us and then we need to think. If you know Freud, Emma Xsteen in the store, she goes into the store every day, everything is normal and everything is the same, but suddenly she feels the shutter like someone's walked over her grave and for Freud, this is some childhood trauma. But Duluth would say that these kinds of encounters can happen anywhere and all the time. You're not thinking in a sense, you're not stirred into thinking in the way Duluth wants to understand thinking until those things happen and they happen all the time. The way I talk to described this with my students is, I can't remember the fighter's name when Mike Tyson was at his scariest height. - The Vanderholly field? - No, it was for Holyfield. No, this is the 80s. There's somebody who said like he had a plan for defeating Tyson. He had a plan and they asked Tyson about this. He says he has a plan to beat you in Tyson. Everyone does a plan to get punched in the mouth. As soon as you get punched in the mouth, that's when you actually have to start thinking and you don't have time to do anything else if you're a boxing match, right? I don't know if you would know a political theorist at Fordham University in Nick Tampio. I didn't know this until I gave that in a paper and he said that he was an amateur boxer for open. He said like the one time he ever felt really present in the world was when he was in a boxing ring because you can't reflect. You have to immediately react and so forth. But we get punched in the mouth a lot, to lose what's a, and that's the source of where we think. We encounter something. We can't get our heads around. I think maybe that's a good way of understanding what to lose things of this world that we're in and there's no transcendent world outside of it. This is the world which we're in is a world which by definition is not by definition, but by lived experience. It's so complex that we can't really get our heads around it. We always run into the way in which our senses and our meanings and the things we rely on are exceeded. Well, I want to return to the existential resonances for just a second because I think what you're describing is actually not that inconsistent. Well, with Sartt first of all, but just with existentialist thinkers in general, I mean the presumption there is that we find ourselves already existing in this imminent plane of nonsense. Not where nonsense is the absence of sense, but where nonsense is not immediately organized as a kind of transcendental illusion that might help us live our lives. And so we have to, as you say, think in order to give direction, choose a direction of these multiple directions that can be chosen in any particular situation, both as individuals and as collectivities. We have to choose a direction. But I think another way to describe what you're saying is the act of thinking is the act of deciding. And here obviously I'm borrowing from Derry Derry Derry Derry says, look, we're in this situation all the time where things are undecidable. The meanings are not already determined. The directions are not obvious to us on the face of themselves. But we have to decide nevertheless. We don't get to just sort of sit on our hands and wait for meaning to emerge crystal clear by some transcendental act of God or something. That's been my plan for the last 55 years. I was not working out for you, Bob. Ever since you were old enough to come up with the plan? Yeah, so I would want to push you a little bit on what you described as this kind of radical agent freedom of sort, which I always think is overblown by people. I don't think it's there in sort in the way that people describe it. Or if it's there, he got rid of it. Like he was dissatisfied with that formulation. Yeah, but maybe a better way to talk about what people often ascribe to start as this kind of radical moment of free, agential decision is something actually closer to what Derry Derry does call a decision, which is very messy and which involves exactly what you've been describing so far, which is that we find ourselves on an imminent plane of nonsense, right? That has so much sense, but that sense is not going to be effectuated. I think it's the word that you use. That sense is not going to be effectuated without some decision, whether that's a decision by an individual, by a body, by a call activity. I mean, is there that much difference because, you know, Derry Derry Derry's on delusor contemporary areas, but you don't really hear either of them talking much about the other. That's true. That's true. That's true. Or they talk about these other very cryptic ways. Yeah, right. They sub-tweet each other all the time. Yeah, yeah. That's a good way. I will say this very quickly. When Delus died, I was attending Derry Dath's seminar at that time. So Derry Dath came in, Delus had just died. And he said, you know, I know that you expect me to say something about Delus. I will say this. One of his favorite stories was Bartleby, the Scrivner. And so much like Bartleby, in response to your request for me to address Delus' death, I would prefer not to. Yeah. I did one of Delus' favorite stories. It's certainly, you mentioned it in later work. Yeah. I think, and maybe this deserves some clarification. There's a way in which sense is effectuated and it expresses a particular meaning. But it's never left at that. And so the by-valence of it always continues. Can I use another boxing example? Because I like using these boxing examples. Did you wake up today and choose violence? I mean, carry on. No, no. No, they're very useful once. There's this really wonderful interview that Muhammad Ali gives. It's a British interview with Michael Parkinson. If you could find it on YouTube or somewhere else, it's great. But he's just beaten George Foreman. He's won back his title. And he's been named Sports Personality of the Year. And Parkinson asks him if this is a prize to him. He says, yeah, this is a prize to me because I just beat this bum who was nothing. This is George Foreman. And Parkinson's, well, you know, Foreman beat Joe Frazier and he beat Ken Norton, two guys who beat you. So like, how can you say he's a bum? And Ali says he didn't beat him. He just hit him with a punch that they didn't recuperate from. And everyone starts laughing. And he says, sunny, listen, knocked out Floyd Patterson twice in one round. Then I fought Floyd Patterson twice, two full fights and didn't knock him out. But I knocked out sunny, listen, it's the style. And then he goes on to explain this. If you know Joe Frazier, smoking Joe Frazier, you would always fight going forward. He never knew how to back down. This whole idea was he'd smother other fighters and stuff. You know, he comes forward and Foreman hits him and knocks him down. Ali says he doesn't have enough sense. It's a great word for this. He doesn't have enough sense to say I'm hit a better backup. He doesn't back up. He gets knocked down. He doesn't have enough sense to say millions of dollars are involved. My heavyweight title. I'm getting a third chance. He gets up because Fordy gets knocked down. He got knocked down six times before the fight stopped. And he was about to get up and go forward again. The way I present this, someone to talk about it is does Foreman beat Frazier, just Frazier beat himself? Who wins the fight or who loses the fight? And like both of these things are true. Foreman beat Frazier, Frazier beat himself. And the reason why I love that example is the by-valence of sense of like the events that happen in the world is always there because there are always these double meanings to them. And it always comes down to the style in the clash. Like that's what makes a fight a fight, right? As you have two contrasting styles, you have something fun. You have something interesting. You have two guys who just hit each other. Who are like fighters rather than boxers, I'd to speak. That's a brutal fight. That's something to watch. If you have a fighter and a counter-puncher, like then it's interesting because you have strategies and stuff. I don't want to say that life is a fight. It's a struggle in a niche in sense. You always have to begin with what you have, with the style you have. And that can change, but sometimes it can't change. To lose in what Tari talk about this in later work. And this is again how it's not simply sartrain. You don't choose how you change because you only change once you get punched in the face. And then the possibilities of changing come down to the styles that are already kind of ingrained. Frazier couldn't change because he didn't have the skills or the temperament to be the kind of fighter who backs up who like recovers that way. So yeah, to kind of plug this all back into existential and undecidability. Yeah, there isn't one way of doing it. There are ways that work to different degrees, but there's no pre-given rules. And so a lot of it comes down to it being experimental. It's not an experiment from nothing. It's an experiment based on what you already have. But the way this develops later on, I think you find this in Foucault. I think you do find this in Derrata too. You certainly find it and Deleuze's later work with Gwattari is that becoming involves tactics and logistics and strategies. Oftentimes invented in the moment, but that's what makes a creative. So those kinds of forms of change, all of those factors are linked up with them. There's no way of predicting it. The other way of putting it in, Deleuze says this with respect to sense is its independent of truth. If something is and if something is not, they can have the same sense. If one thing happens in the opposite of the thing, it happens to have the same sense. At Frazier, beat Foreman, had he managed to smother him, had his style worked, had he managed to get the first punch in it, he knocked down Foreman first, that a Foreman knocking down him first. He would have won for the exact same reason that he lost in the world that we live in. His style, other work, or didn't. But the thing Deleuze says about sense is that the sense can be the same in completely opposite circumstances and that's why it has to be interpreted. Hey y'all, before you head out, we'd love one small favor. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. And if something you heard made you think, laugh or question everything you thought you knew, go ahead and send the episode to a friend. After all, every bar gets its best regulars through word of mouth. Catch you on the flipside. So I'm one of those people who came to Deleuze first by reading his books on other philosophers. And I honestly think his books on Nietzsche and Spinoza are some of the absolute best philosophy books I've ever read. And they're curious. Yes, because they're not explications of Nietzsche and Spinoza. He is doing his own philosophy, sort of along with them, beside them. And as Cedrician, I often thought that this was such a good example of what doing philosophy with an attention to what Derri-Docke's "differance" means, that there are all of these meanings, these senses that are always in the margins, that the text has to leave out in order for the text to make sense. And I suppose one of the things that is kind of curious to me about the boxing examples that you were giving us in the last segment is you said, "Look, even when someone wins the fight, the difference between the sense of what that means, like, is still both ways, you know, the difference is still there." And I think that what I would say is, the difference is still there. But the difference is never there simply. And I think that seems to be why, on my understanding, Deliz takes Hagel to be an enemy because Hagel needs the difference to actually be there in order for the dialectic to run the way it's supposed to run. So I'm sorry, I keep seeming like I'm asking you to explain why Derri-Docke and Deliz don't talk about each other enough, and that's not really what I'm asking. I'm just trying to get a better sense of what exactly is the nature of difference on this imminent plane of sense and nonsense? And how is that different with an E than what Derri-Docke caused this sort of plane of imminent difference? He doesn't use that term, but you know what I mean. I mean, there's maybe two questions in there. Let me give you two answers. As one is a question of how does Deliz read these figures and to what extent is that like Derri-Docke or what extent maybe is not? This kind of gets back to the Hippoly book, to Logic and Existence. And this is why it shows it as a way, in my own book, to plot Deliz's intellectual path, the sense of his path from there, is that that book has, in some cases, even just simply just in passing, but other times, like a bit more sustained, readings and dismissals of all the key figures that Deliz marshals against Hegel. There's a reading and dismissal of human empiricism, a reading and dismissal of Birx and there's several parts where Hippolyd dismisses Birx and Spinoza's and other, live, and it's another. Nietzsche isn't so much dismissed, but like everything he kind of said, Hegel had already anticipated and said. And Deliz just kind of picks up each one of those thinkers and each one of his readings has a response in it to the way in which Hippolyd dismisses them. And the way Hippolyd dismisses all of them is by saying they don't have an adequate understanding of difference as speculative contradiction. So Heum's difference, a notion of empirical difference, that all impressions and all ideas are different and therefore they're distinct. That's inadequate. Birx and attempt to think of a kind of difference, which is those temporal, but discontinuous, that doesn't have negation in it, Spinoza doesn't have negation, all of those thinkers. And Deliz, his rejection of Hegel is also a rejection of the notion that difference has to be negative. So that's where you get this whole affirmative notion of difference that you see, for example, in the Nietzsche book. So that in many ways explains his choice. It's not the only things he wrote. He also has a book on Sasha Massos, he has a book on proofs that he writes also in the early period. But the thinkers that Hippolyd dismisses in his Hegel book are actually Deliz writes books on all of them. Well, he doesn't write a book on live notes in the early point, but he has direct responses to Hippolyd's reading of live notes in difference or repetition. Now how does he read them and how is it similar or different from Derrida? I mean, I think, you know, Derrida is famously like, there's a second reading submerged within and you can see how it's both provides the conditions of possibility and impossibility for the reading that we have for the dominant reading. Deliz has a different way of putting it. Again, like he says, he was more or less bludgeon to death with the history of philosophy. So he chose this heterodox way of reading the history of philosophy and he talks about producing these monsters like taking a thinker from behind and buggering him and producing this monster's offspring. But he does it in this really funny way. And what essentially he does is he invents usually with no basis whatsoever in any kind of historical fact, some connection between the thinker he's studying and somebody else. But the Spinoza ones a really interesting one. He says that Spinoza was deeply influenced by medieval theologian John Don Scotus and his thesis on university and formal distinction and his whole theory of the differences between attributes and modes and how they relate to substance of it comes out of Don Scotus. Even though there's no evidence that he read Don Scotus, but he knew a Scotus theologian and he was interested in the similar metaphysical problems. Bergsson was influenced deeply by Bernard Riemann's thesis on multiplicities or manifolds and the distinction between discreeting and continuous manifolds. Even though there's no evidence that Bergsson read Riemann, but Bergsson was interested in mathematics, even though so much of his philosophy turns a runaway from mathematics. So he invents these things. There's a really interesting one. Hume, he says, is the father of Bergsson Russell's idea that relations are external to their terms. So what he says is that he breaks away from Hegel. And he says that actually goes back to Hume and then he makes a sweeping statement all empiricisms are defined by the externality of relations, which come from Hume and not from Russell. So he has that way of doing his readings. I suppose they're specialists who also criticize Derrida and say he's making up this other reading. Specialists always hate the way to lose this because he'll come up with this huge reading which is kind of like a what if this thinker was deeply influenced by this other one by some subterranean connections that we can't actually see. So that's kind of his strategy. And yeah, what he tries to do is tease out this alternative reading. We're suddenly all of these figures and he has ancient ones too, the stoics are one, Lucretius is another and Epicurus, but our reading of Epicurus is primarily from Lucretius, right? He has this way of establishing this in a way counter lineage of philosophy. Philosophy isn't just representation, philosophy isn't just identity, there's this counter lineage of philosophy which are these philosophers of difference. It sounds like you're saying he's doing philosophy through the looking glass. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it too. Now what is this difference he's after? There's a long development of this notion of difference. It doesn't appear exactly the same way in the human book as it does in the Bergsson book as it does in others. I think with Duluth which is interesting and your derida has this reference to Duluth's radio Nietzsche in the difference essay and he only I think captures like one of the two notions of difference. Duluth always says that difference has to be internal difference. He says relations are always external to their terms, but difference is always internal difference. What makes something what it is is its internal difference not only from what it is not but also from itself. So that's how you get this notion of difference in itself which actually is that it's term used in Hegel too by the way difference in itself or used in hippoly tweeting of Hegel but I think it's in Hegel too. But there's two notions of internal difference that Duluth develops. It kind of reaches its high point in difference and repetition and it goes into Duluth's notion of structure in the early works while he's still kind of playing around with trying to in a way invent post-structuralism from structures. I mean, like the way which derida does it too and Foucault does it while saying he's not a structuralist. There are these internal differences that relate to each other, but they can only relate to each other through a second order difference which he calls their differentiator of difference. The way I try and say it in the book is the first order of difference is virtual. The second order of difference is intensive and a lot of times people link those together and they say virtual differences are intensive differences. But I think if you kind of go through the nuts and bolts of Duluth's works, you can see how he's differentiating the two of them. Intensive difference is the more important. What characterizes intensive difference is that it is different in itself before we can even talk about it being different from other things. And in being different in itself, it has its own kind of spatiality and temporality that are also intensive. They can unfold themselves. But the starting point is that they have a temporality and spatiality in which they escape themselves. Deridan Duluth's, you're right, don't talk very much about each other. I think in that period of the 60s, which is also the period that the book is covering primarily, they are actually very close. The reasons of Plato are very close. Their understanding is of Simulatra are very close. And I actually think that, you know, what Deridan talks about, difference with the A as the becoming time of space and becoming space of time, Duluth's, when he speaks about intensity, is very similar to that. And he links that into sense because there's a way in which intensities, that's ultimately what we encounter, what causes thinking, are intensities. They can only be sensed. They can't be recognized. And the effect of these intensities is to shape and reshape the time and the space of our thinking, of our perception of the way we bring our thinking to bear upon our perceptions. Here's a different example. This one is in the book. Duluth has this fit in difference in repetition where he says it's not the physical size of an object that we see in front of us that makes it dominate our perception. It's the intensity over and counter with it. And that intensity can be displaced. So you're with your partner before some great imposing human or natural object, the grand canyon, something else. And it dominates its own press and it overwhelms you. So your partner whispers to you for the first time. I love you. And then suddenly that's true. to be in significance. The grand canyon is still there, but the time and space of your own perception of it and what dominates you, it no longer dominates your perception, that's all changed. And so encounters the way in which they give rise to thinking, it has something to do with that. It's something that we can't represent because it underpins how we then represent things to ourselves and how suddenly this becomes significant. This is what the sense of my experience here now is as opposed to something else. It also doesn't make sense. Well, it does, it does make sense. I mean, I think that's a really good example because going back to the three-part distinction that we made at the very beginning of this episode, when we're talking about sense in the sense of meaning, sense in the sense of affects and sense in the sense of direction, what that example really is helpful in illustrating is that we can see the differences in intensities in all three of those senses of sense. That's actually really helpful. And I mean, for me, like really enlightening. And also, it does show, as I think you're trying to show in your book, that sense is never simply linguistic or cognitive. It is ontological. And so at an ontological level, when we talk about sense and nonsense, it's always going to be in terms of intensities. And when we focus on these different senses of sense, all of those can only be articulated in terms of this, you know, again, eminent plane of intensities that are effectuated, I suppose, is the word to use. Yeah, I didn't mean in that sense of it not making sense. I meant the notion of this world that we're in that we can't get our heads around. And Duluth writes about this too in passing in little bits here and there. I think his understanding what humor is has a lot to do with engaging with that aspect of it. I mean, he's not the first person, certainly not the first or last person to speak of how humor is a reaction to or an engagement with absurdities, right? Or what doesn't make sense? Or the absurdities that are found within things that make sense. But I think those encounters and the reason why humor is so important, since it's linked to that. What I meant by saying it doesn't make sense is my wife, who I love very much, this is my second wife, who I met when I was still raw and going through the divorce for my first wife, which is very difficult for me, but you don't need to know all of that. Except to say that I was very, very wary. I had trusted she's I was very scared and I was constantly saying, yeah, I don't want to commit, I don't want to commit, I don't want to commit. And when I finally did say to her the first time, I love you, she said, what do you mean? Or you've been saying it. And so it doesn't make sense, you know, there is something about that statement, you know, that I love you. Everyone kind of knows what it means and doesn't know what it means. Probably you didn't need to be with me going through all of that to kind of think, what do you mean? You just said you love me. I'm sure there are others. And there's something funny about it too, right? Or maybe there's just something in my story of it. But yeah, there's something around the encounters. There's always this humor to the encounter. There can be things that are traumatic about the encounter. Sometimes there's universe because they're traumatic and vice versa. But they underpin these kinds of funny ways in which sense has changed, which we change. So I want to try to venture a metaphor here if I could based on everything that you've said throughout this discussion about the concept of sense in delus. So bear with me here because you might be tempted to say, no, no, that's not what he says. This is not what he says. This is what I'm saying in an attempt to understand it. So I want to take the example of an amoeba that exists in a kind of fluid medium. That fluid medium is the plane of eminence. Right. And the amoeba is more or less protected from it, not completely shut off from it, but protected from it by its membrane. The membrane is sort of the tightly woven fabric of transcendental illusions that it uses to protect itself, to identify itself as what it is, to distinguish itself from it inside, from an outside. That amoeba is also permeable to a certain extent. And in that fluid medium, there could be waves or motions. And maybe the amoeba just sort of flows along with those waves. It's relatively unaffected by them. But sometimes in that fluid medium, it might encounter something that this is what amoebas do will try to engulf it or it will try engulf it or vice versa. And you know, that thing that it encounters might be food or it might be poison. If it's the latter, the poor amoeba might die. If it's the former, it will grow stronger and adapt change. It's encountered something that may be positive, may be traumatic, but necessitates change. It's encountered something from the outside that is subject to external forces, etc. So is this metaphor, which is, I think, a good one for the will to power? Yeah, absolutely. Nietzsche uses it for the will to power. I was hoping nobody would have read will to power first number. I forget what it is. It's about ten of them, but yes. But is that apt for thinking about the concept of sense in the lows? Short answer is yes. Slightly longer answer is that there's got to be a bit more nuance around the inside outside distinction. Again, it doesn't deny that there are insides and outsides. But the way in which he would think that the amoeba relates to its outside is probably not as straightforward as there's a permeable membrane in between. So yeah, we, I mean, you know, we can work that out in a second lesson. Yes. This was a good first lesson. Well, unfortunately, folks, they're playing that music again, which means that the bartender has given us last call. And so while she is pouring our final drinks, I want to give everyone here a chance to let us know what your final thoughts are about this conversation. It's been a lot. And I really appreciate Nathan taking the time to explain this really complicated, but really fascinating argument that he's making on a figure that to be honest, a lot of people find both complicated and fascinating. So let me go to you first, Jen. Nathan, I want to echo Lee here and just say thank you so much for coming and talking to me about Zalooz because this is not my corner of philosophy world. I really enjoy learning about it. I do have one takeaway, though, which is that, okay, D'Looz in a way is talking about theses' boat, but he sort of thinks of theses' boat as a feature, not a bug. He says, of course, we're always constructing it as we go, but why should that be a problem? That's just what it is to live in the world. And so that was sort of my little analytic takeaway, but I think that's a really nice thing to say. Bob, what about you? Well, this was a really dense conversation and my brow did furrow a couple of times, which I do not need because I've already got enough wrinkles up there, but it did put me in mind of a number of notions and phenomenology that were very, very similar to this and that I was keen on writing about and never got around to writing about. It's just a historical footnote, you know. Hippolyte was certainly one of his professors, but another of D'Looz's professors was Melo Ponti, who also was a mentor not only to D'Looz, but also to Foucault and Derry Dott. And as soon as he died in 1961, everybody forgot about him and started doing their own thing, but there's so much in sort of the unpublished Melo Ponti in his notes and in his lecture courses, et cetera, that is very much in line with what we were talking about here in the concept of sense, this notion of multiplicity, imminence, et cetera. So he almost want to go back and reread some of those notes and start thinking again, this has been an encounter. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that this encounter has really motivated in me is a desire to go back and look a lot more closely at the Carol work. I think that your explanation, Nathan, of the co-constitutive relationship between sense and nonsense, that they aren't just opposites, but they actually co-constitute each other. It's really helpful to me. It reminds me of that quote from Alison Wonderland where they say, "Jamm today." What is it? Jam tomorrow. Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today. I mean, it's such a good example of exactly what you've been describing. But what are your final thoughts that you want to leave our listeners with? Oh gosh, that's, I mean, a really, really lovely experience, and it's been great to talk to all three of you. I've actually known Bob, but only by Facebook for many years. I've never met him. Lee, I've known of you for a long time, but haven't met until today. So, I mean, hey, it's just nice to meet all three of you and to make new connections, which is also part of what the encounter with the world is. You know, I've kind of finished this book. It came out only a few weeks ago, and I'm still busy trying to figure out what I need to do next. Part of me wants to write the next book, which is from DeLuz's "Cleparations with Quattarion" words. Part of me also wants, because I do take the sun board. You know, there are other people I feel like who've done a lot of good work with DeLuz and phenomenology. Henry Summers Hall, a colleague of mine, for example. He's not the only one, but that is a world that still remains opaque to me coming out of political theory and kind of getting involved with DeLuz in the 90s. And largely what I did in my PhD in elsewhere was to try and track down the things DeLuz is directly talking about. So what do those six pages on Don Scotus mean in difference in repetition and like, what did this thing hear me? It's great that philosophy exists so that there's a home for nerds. Yeah. This is true. This is definitely true. - Well, I just want to repeat our genuine thanks and genuine appreciation for you taking the time to talk to us today. And for all of our nerdy listeners, you can get Nathan's book from SUNY Press. So be sure to order it, pour yourself a stiff drink before you sit down. You're probably gonna need it. It is a journey. - It is only in a very expensive hardback now and electronic kind of addition, but there is a paperback that's also due out in December. I feel remiss if I didn't say if I didn't make it clear. - That's great news. - 'Cause some people might go onto the website and think, "I can't pay that much for this book." - Well, wait for the paperback and then you can buy yourself two drinks while you read it. - You're gonna make a great Christmas gift. - There you go. - All right, you guys, we've got to get out of here. Thanks again, Nathan, and I will catch you all next time. - Good night, y'all. - Good night, everyone. - Cheers, good night. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)