Eliminative Culinarism
Eliminative Cul.:
"To put it differently, only by binding the dead as a negative agency can the living establish its myth of inherent persistence, intelligibility and difference or determination as such."
"The unraveling of the problem of determination of being as such (posed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition and to some extent in The Logic of Sense) can only gain a true speculative capacity once we factor in the implicit determination of being by the principle of non-belonging qua the void."
kvond:
I am curious to the status of "only" above. Is this a logical only? If so, where is the "haunt" in the plentitude of affirmation, the determination of Being in the Philosophy of Spinoza? If you can locate it there, then I think it is fair to imagine that the haunt haunts Deleuze. If you cannot, then Deleuze ever has recourse to this ghostless kernel which renounces any appeal to the void or lack.
Sorry for the delay in responding. These are just some quick notes and blurry thoughts:
The negative binding or extensive / outward negation which is a ground for the haunt manifests in the principle of unilateral distinction, which according to Deleuze is at the base of every difference or determination as such. For Artaud, unilateral distinction constitutes life qua cruelty (hence all the references to cruelty and determination in DR).
According to Deleuze, in order for X to distinguish itself against the undetermined background (Y or not-X), it must make a difference by two vectors, one that works through the necessity of affirmation and the other that employs the supplementary role of negation ("negation arises in the wake of affirmation or 'beside it', but only as the shadow of the more profound genetic element" DR). These two vectors are required for any unilateral distinction against Y: whilst X must primarily distinguish itself by affirming its internal necessity, it must also – adjunctively – distinguish itself from the undetermined as an extensive distinction, so that X is determined against the undetermined Y both intensively and extensively. The vector of negative determination 'against' the undetermined translates the unilateral distinction of X as a difference in itself into an extensive determination against the undetermined and thereby, completes determination in the last instance. This negative binding or determination is exactly the medium through which Y qua not-X haunts X by rejecting to divorce that which separates from it. Deleuze insists that unilateral distinction whereby determination (which envelopes difference in affirmation) is effectuated consists only in a unilateral estrangement from the undetermined Y (which is negatively bound as not-X). This means that from the other end, the undetermined does not really distinguish itself from X and indeed will continue to follow it (i.e. haunts it). This is evident in Deleuze's reiteration of the principle of unilateralization: "[the line of determination] participates in the ground all the more violently in that it distinguishes itself from it without the ground distinguishing itself from the line." In this sense, unilateralization of the living in regard to a vital necessity, or in other words, determination of the living as a difference in itself means that the dead refuses to divorce the living. So from 'the other side', the 'grounding of difference in affirmation' brings with itself the haunting influence of the negatively bound undetermined or the dead.
This obviously needs more elaboration esp. in regard to the bigger picture which is Deleuze's philosophy of difference in relation to Spinoza's ethics but that's for another time in a near future.
I like your response, but unfortunately you have not really answered my question...rather only have repeated a position (I can accept that).
Perhaps though if you explain your position in terms of the Body Without Organs, a concept that Deleuze used at several stages in his thinking, I would have a better sense of the significance of what you mean.
I might also ask you as per your:
""[the line of determination] participates in the ground all the more violently in that it distinguishes itself from it without the ground distinguishing itself from the line." In this sense, unilateralization of the living in regard to a vital necessity, or in other words, determination of the living as a difference in itself means that the dead refuses to divorce the living. So from 'the other side', the 'grounding of difference in affirmation' brings with itself the haunting influence of the negatively bound undetermined or the dead."
Why, or under what logic, do you equate the "dead" with the "ground"? If I understand this, I also might understand your point more fully.
Before properly answering some of your questions, here some clarifications and more questions:
First this ground is not a general ground. Deleuze makes a few other examples earlier in DR which clarify what this ground really is. It is the undetermined ground of chiaroscuro which Deleuze compares to the black void of the undetermined; the nigrescent ground of chiaroscuro from which the abstract line emerges is called Tenebrum and is made of the caput mortuum paint (see Rzepińska's ' Tenebrism in Baroque Painting and Its Ideological Background ' on how the ground as the background of chiaroscuro is connected to early Renaissance’s philosophies of putrefaction and necrosis). Second, we shouldn’t confuse ground with the negative binding of the ground which I emphasized in my previous comment. Ground is NOT the dead. It is the ‘negative binding’ of the ground (manifesting in the word ‘against’ in the function of the abstract line or the unilaterality of difference-in-itself) that transforms the persisting influence of the undetermined over the determined into the haunt. Difference-in-itself must flee from the negative and persisting influence of the undetermined, and simultaneously uses it as the ground of determination. This simply means that the negative binding of the undetermined subsumed within the function of the unilateral distinction turns the influence of the undetermined into a dead-ly and haunting influence: if determination doesn’t positively distinguish itself, it will be ceased by this haunting influence and relapses into the undetermined which is alien to any determination (whether it is the determination of life, or intelligibility or difference-in-itself). Even Deleuze refers to negation as a shadow of affirmation, but a shadow which always stalks affirmation: it is precisely because affirmation doesn’t give negativity its dependence and merely binds it as a sidekick instrument that it turns negation to the persisting shadow of the undetermined (which is internally ‘foreclosed’ to any ontological determination) in the form of the haunt.
I’m not sure how we can wholesomely and without confusion push Deleuze’s ‘determination qua finding difference in affirmation’ to BwO. But it is surely worth thinking. A few questions here: how can BwO determine itself against absolute non-belonging qua nothing and simultaneously resist – even relatively – 'operation' of belonging qua organization? Does this mean that BwO requires two distinct vectors to determine itself against the former and ‘internally’ resist the influence of the latter or does it mean that internal affirmation is adequate to handle both? Is it through the inherent (positive) difference and the power of affirmation that internal resistance toward organization and determination against absolute emptiness is possible, if yes then how exactly can affirmation operate on both fronts? If it is through the support of an auxiliary operator then what is this operator? In oth
Also some more questions re the assumed dependency of affirmation from the haunt of the negative: How can affirmation really go beyond the reciprocal affordability between the subject and its milieu, an economical bond which is already ‘given’ according to the limitations and affordabilities of the two? Is it really possible for me to affirm that which I cannot afford? If affirmation is already based on the givenness of an affordable outside which I can afford / access / experience and hence I can affirm, then I would like to know how can affirmation be independent of the haunting influence of an instrumentalized negativity? Because in this case, affirmation must determine itself ‘against’ that which surpasses the capacity of the affirming subject and leads to its death. To put it differently, affirmation must implicitly negate the unaffordable in order to embrace the so-called positive or the affordable. Also how can affirmation guarantee a flight to an outside not already fancied and formed by my affordable petty desires? In this sense, is the outside or the flight-space of affirmation really radical or is it just an already afforded image of my restrictions / organic representation? If for the organic agency, the affirmation of the inorganic is an index of its affordability (toward the inorganic) then affirmation is intrinsically using a shadow or spectral negation to transform the object of its affirmation to the affordability of the subject of the affirmation. In other words, how can affirmation keep itself away from the undoing of the organic, other than by tuning its positive principle according to the implicit negation of that which cannot be afforded and leads to the undoing of the organic? Doesn’t affirmation – at least extensively – require a negative binding of that which cannot be afforded in order to perpetuate its so-called positivity, or more precisely, embracing of the affordable?
You write: "The Ground is not the dead"
but previously you wrote:
""[the line of determination] participates in the ground all the more violently in that it distinguishes itself from it without the ground distinguishing itself from the line." In this sense, unilateralization of the living in regard to a vital necessity, or in other words, determination of the living as a difference in itself means that the dead refuses to divorce the living.
Thus you seem to have proposed an equivalence: the ground does not distinguish itself from the line / the dead refuses to divorce the living
Are you mistaken to have written this, or am I mistaken to have seen the conflation?
The negative binding is on the part of the line, the negation through difference, so why do you put it in the hands of the dead? If anywhere, it should be in the hands of the living, and it would not be the dead against which the living transfigures itself, but the modal determinations of OTHER expressions of life, other vectors of power. There is no haunting, other than that achieved through this odd transfer you have enacted. The negative determination can simply be the genetic possibility for combination over time, a forward leaning perspective. I see no reason at all to read the chiaroscuro ground (or the line's determination from it) to have any relation to the Dead.
I think you make far too much of Deleuze's mention of the shadow. The shadow which stalks can just as easily be read as the possibility immanent to any vector of relations.
When you understand the "negation" as Deleuze understood it in light of his Spinoza studies, I think it very wrong to imagine that it somehow equates with what was once living and is now dead and haunting. The negation, as Spinoza employed it, (and as it was abused by Hegel) is simply that which make this thing this, that which determines its limitations (but also the modes of its power) for negations not only limit, but like cells honeycomb, connect. You rather view the negation as something quite different, as some kind of ghostifying death, a living thing that won't let go. This is a very fine reinvention of the meaning of negation, but it certainly does not follow from Deleuze's position. But perhaps I still do not understand how you imagine the Dead to be related to the Ground (or the living line's self-negation)
You seem to make the equation between the Dead and the Ground in a sentence like this:
"Difference-in-itself must flee from the negative and persisting influence of the undetermined, and simultaneously uses it as the ground of determination." as if both the Dead and the Ground are "influencing" the living line.
But the ground is simply the chiaroscuro of possibilities, the fecundity of immanent combination (if I read Deleuze correctly). There is room for the notion of affirmation or denial there. As such, only a backward turning eye would suspect a ghost presence in such a soup, not a necessar
Part of my response above was cut off in the posting process, but enough remains of the fragment to make sense.
As to your second set of comments, I think many of these questions can be answered if one thinks in terms of combination, and not negation in terms of absence, haunting or otherwise.
For instance, " If for the organic agency, the affirmation of the inorganic is an index of its affordability (toward the inorganic) then affirmation is intrinsically using a shadow or spectral negation to transform the object of its affirmation to the affordability of the subject of the affirmation," totally is unspun if you do away with the dichotomy of organic/inorganic, and even agent/object
on second thought, following from the end of the post above the last:
There is NO room for the notion of affirmation or denial there. As such, only a backward turning eye would suspect a ghost presence in such a soup, not a necessary clinging. Only a paranoid construction would insist upon the projection of the dead upon our relations to the chiarcoscuro, the necessary haunting. One might say that Deleuze risks the paranoid in his sojourn with the schizo, but his thinking is not fundamentally paranoid. The negation that flows with affirmation is the negation of oneself in a permutation with all other "selves", not necessarily one looking backwards in time.
What is this ground that ontological determination must be unilaterally pitted against?
I think there is still some misunderstanding here: the undetermined qua the 'assumed' ground of determination is not dead / haunting by itself, it is the negative and unilateral mobilization of determination (difference in affirmation) against the undetermined that turns it to a dead-ly / haunting agency which is simultaneously posited as the ground of determination and a haunting negative agency from which determination must unilaterally escape (i.e. be extensively distinguished).
IMO you are sort of rectifying Deleuze by stressing too much on the Spinozist dimension and excluding the triad of Bergeson-Kant-Schelling in DR.
"As to your second set of comments, I think many of these questions can be answered if one thinks in terms of combination, and not negation in terms of absence, haunting or otherwise."
I'm looking forward to any explanation / clarification of Deleuze's theory of affirmation outside of typical mystico-poetic psudophilosophy or Deleuze-happy concept-engineering.
incognitum: "
I think there is still some misunderstanding here: the undetermined qua the 'assumed' ground of determination is not dead / haunting by itself, it is the negative and unilateral mobilization of determination (difference in affirmation) against the undetermined that turns it to a dead-ly / haunting agency which is simultaneously posited as the ground of determination and a haunting negative agency from which determination must unilaterally escape (i.e. be extensively distinguished)."
kvond: I can see your poetic point, but it does not strictly FOLLOW, in fact I feel that it violates in sense quite a bit about what Deleuze has in mind. What you have proposed, if I understand you, is a paronoid REACTION to the undetermined. The affirmation is "against" the undetermined, in the sense that it is NOT the underdetermined, but Deleuze I feel is quite Nietzschean in his conception of negation here, and any reading of "against" which is not a sailing up and over would put the line in a reactive, passive state.
Saying it in another way, haunting, that is real or literal haunting, is a fundamentally passive state. Ghostly forces over which you have no control or effect have some control or effect over you. Haunting brings about fear, or at best nostalgia (paranoia's sweet cousin). There is no way that Deleuze would imagine the negation of the undetermined, THAT against, as a fundamentally passive, reactionary mentality.
Now perhaps you don't mean to include this passivity in your word-choice of "haunting" (which I will tell you is a beautiful one, and quite accomplished), but this is fundamentally what the word means and thus invokes.
IN: "IMO you are sort of rectifying Deleuze by stressing too much on the Spinozist dimension and excluding the triad of Bergeson-Kant-Schelling in DR. "
Kvond: This is very well possible. It is hard to parse out all the ancestors of Deleuze (was he haunted by them as we seem to read him, or was he the living line that leapt from them?). I don't feel that there is much conflict between the Bersonian and Spinozist influences, but his Kant and even Schelling my provide counter currents. But really what I feel that Deleuze has in mind (and someone who is in many way amenable to Spinoza) in his notions of "against" and "affirmation" is Nietzsche. And as I said above, it is the Nietzschean Deleuze that would refuse a fundamental haunting.
IN: "I'm looking forward to any explanation / clarification of Deleuze's theory of affirmation outside of typical mystico-poetic psudophilosophy or Deleuze-happy concept-engineering."
kvond: I don't know if my thought falls into either of those categories. Perhaps look at my Deleuzian, Wittgensteinian and Davidsonian synthesis of Spinoza, on the subject of transgender, and tell me if it is to mystico or engineered:
http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/.../2008/05/15/23/
There the BwO is addressed, but put within a social matrix of change, stabilit
[continued from above]...within a social matrix of change, stability and rationality. Perhaps not your cup of tea, but I think that once you accept the Spinozist refutation of "lack", the dissolution of the subject/object dichotomy, and a fundamental notion of affirmation action not re-action, much I believe is opened in terms of description.
EC,
I have been thinking hard about your thesis, and I want to say that given my criticism of it in the above, I will tell you that I DO believe that there is an intentional construction of the haunt, that which marks Gothic literature and some of its architecture. What I mean by this is that there is I believe an attempt to build a series of ruins, as ruins, so as to construct a place of haunting, to summon the ghost, in a sense.
I write about this in this posting of an old paper of mine: http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/...art-of-a-topos/
In this paper I argue that Bronte's literary strategies of disassociated spatial, subject-defying construction in the first three chapters of Wuthering Heights literally produce a place of haunting, a place for the ghost of Cathy as pure voice. I compare this to the intentional ruin etchings of the proto-gothic archetect Piranesi, who invoked the permanence of Rome through the eroticized illustration of fictitious ruins. This is a way, what I call the anti-archetect drive. This is a fundamental strategy against Becoming, designing a circulation of effects upon itself.
I will say that though Deleuze does not fall victim to a haunting (his defintion of affirmation prevents this), it can be seen that he constructs a kind of haunting, in the sense that the chiaroscuro of the ground is a constructed effect, and that this is an appeal to a kind of eternity, very close to BwO projects in the loop that they make.
From my point of view, this is the fact that you capture intuitionally in your analysis of the haunt of Deleuze.
Thanks kvond for your comments, it might take a while for me to process these as I'm a bit tied up atm, but thanks very much for your critical enthusiasm.
Some points for now:
"What you have proposed, if I understand you, is a paronoid REACTION to the undetermined."
Well, no one actually put the emphasis on 'the undetermined', the center of attention is determination as such, or more precisely, ontological determination, and in this context (hauntology), it is the determination of being as such or determination of the living which is central.
"The affirmation is "against" the undetermined, in the sense that it is NOT the underdetermined, but Deleuze I feel is quite Nietzschean in his conception of negation here, and any reading of "against" which is not a sailing up and over would put the line in a reactive, passive state."
Exactly!! Determination is not 'against' the undetermined as an active negative principle otherwise determination will erase its own ground from which it must be distinguished. Determination (X) is only against the undetermined insofar as it is not the undetermined (Y) i.e. it brings about the possibility of capturing Y as not-X. Part of what I am objecting to here is this possibility of determination (or ontological determination in this context) from the undetermined that is 'so given'. Who or what agency guarantees such possibility? In hauntology, it is not the explicit idea of the dead (or the negative binding of Y [whatever Y is]) that is important, it is rather the 'given' determination of the living as an assumed distinction which brings about the possibility of hauntology which is pivotal. While gothic hauntology emphasizes on the former (the dead), 'the weird' including an array of post-Lovecraftian writers (Ligotti is the most prominent example) stresses on the latter: that the position of the living against which a negative agency can be pitted or the living as a hosting-zone for the negative return of the dead is itself questionable insofar as its ontological determination is problematically given and presumed as an ideal or prioritized condition.
"Saying it in another way, haunting, that is real or literal haunting, is a fundamentally passive state. Ghostly forces over which you have no control or effect have some control or effect over you."
I have to disagree with this. Hauntology is only passive in regard to superficial (on the surface) registers and explicit psychological symptoms. The haunt is in fact always bringing an active state and establishes it as a problematical ground. Hauntology's active state (and that's one of the reasons that Capitalism and vitalistic doctrines are interested in certain aspects of hauntology) is that it always – as an implicit fundamental principle – actively distinguishes the living from the dead and contributes / affirms the given determination of the living prior to or at the same time as it imposes the influence of the dead. The passive state of the haunt (influence of the dead over the living) can only be established on the active state of the living, so before the haunt becomes a medium of the dead, it must affirm the living as a given platform for receiving the dead. In other words, hauntology contributes to the living as a prior and necessary active state, even though hauntology's affirmation of this givenness of the living or the active principle of life is essentially done through a neurotic / paranoid channel. In hauntology, the living is actively contributed to and affirmed as a priority, a given necessity and an active state which must be exorcized either through mourning or by finding a new place for the living completely dissociated from the so-called dead-ly influence. We know that in hauntological stories the second option is not always working. One of the definite characteristics of hauntological stories is that in these stories almost everyone either emphatically affirms his/her livelihood (albeit under some sort of neurotic condition caused by ghostly forces) or is forced to conclude that he/she is alive (with or without the actual presence of the dead).
"your analysis of the haunt of Deleuze"
I don't know what happened but I think we lost track of the main text at some point: the counter-hauntology piece was supposed to be a critique of Meillassoux's essay not Deleuze. Speaking of this, I highly recommend the last issue of Collapse in which Meillassoux's essay appeared (of course, if you haven't read it already). Also in the same issue there is a brilliant piece by Iain Hamilton Grant where he gives a fresh account of Deleuzian ontological determination and the grounding of difference in affirmation through Okenian naturphilosophie. I guess you will enjoy that.
" In this paper I argue that Bronte's literary strategies of disassociated spatial ..."
Thanks very much, it sounds fascinating ... will check it soon and let you know what i think.
EC: "The passive state of the haunt (influence of the dead over the living) can only be established on the active state of the living, so before the haunt becomes a medium of the dead, it must affirm the living as a given platform for receiving the dead. In other words, hauntology contributes to the living as a prior and necessary active state, even though hauntology's affirmation of this givenness of the living or the active principle of life is essentially done through a neurotic / paranoid channel. "
Kvond: Hmmm. I read you, I see you SAYING that the haunt is a fundamentally an active relation, but then nearly everything you THEN say about it, is a passive relation.
What can I say, if we are talking strategy or program, yes I can agree. If we are talking about a logical determination of a relation, characterized by the rhetoric of what the word means, then I think I cannot. That is, vitalism can and does go on without the "haunt" (it being a strategy. It is not the case that unless the haunt is acknowledged by the vitalist, the haunt has been repressed, and will "return". If you are not asserting this last point, I think we generally would agree.
Commenting by HaloScan
