Vários Autores - Deleuze Studies Journal Volume 9 Issue 1

Libidinal Symptomatology in Deleuze’s
Masochism – Coldness and Cruelty
Erika Gaudlitz Federation University Australia
Abstract
In taking up Deleuze’s differential diagnosis by observing Masoch’s
literary practice and extracting his libidinal principles of imperatives,
contracts, fetishism and rituals, I demonstrate Deleuzian libidinal
symptomatology as a specific semiotics in the service of schizoanalysis.
I shall argue that in Masoch the schizoanalytic curettage of the
unconscious is executed as schizoid waiting where the fleeting outer
symptoms of pain–pleasure reveal the masochist’s desired inner splitting
of the senses.
Several critical-clinical inroads to the schizoanalytic project can be
envisaged. Initially, Masoch’s visionary concept of sexualised world
history is supported by his strategic move to the law of the oral mother,
yet then extended by Deleuze’s concept of (inter)maternal symbolic
which speculates on the fantasised rebirth of a sexless or hermaphroditic
man. Finally, the parodic enactment of eros and thanatos functions
as technique of dialectical disguise within the masochist’s scheme of
practising libidinal liberation.
Masochism considered as a state of bodily experimentation which
turns the oedipal law upside down, emerges as a distinct literary genre
in Deleuzian aesthetics.
Keywords: libidinal symptomatology, masochism, de-oedipalisation
Deleuze Studies 9.1 (2015): 1–24

DOI: 10.3366/dls.2015.0172
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/journal/dls
2 Erika Gaudlitz
I. Introduction – Deleuze Engaging with Masoch

Deleuze was fascinated with Masoch’s literary work and returns to it at
several intervals.1 While Deleuze draws on a rich knowledge of Masoch’s
other works, I am focusing on Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs published
with Deleuze’s aesthetic-literary treatise on the symptoms of coldness
and cruelty. One could assume that the attraction of Masoch’s works lies
in an erotic promise, but they are bare of sexuality, yet immersed in an
‘atmosphere of suffocation and suspense’ (Deleuze 2006: 25). This is not
to say that Deleuze was a puritan since he also eloquently engages with
Sade to defuse the ‘semiological howler’ of sadomasochism (Deleuze
2006: 134).
Deleuze’s recurrent engagement with Masoch can be traced
to his psychoanalytic interest in debunking Freudian masochism
while, simultaneously, establishing a literary practice of libidinal
symptomatology. Such a practice appears as symptomatological
semiotics in Proust and Signs, as schizoanalysis or pragmatics in Anti-
Oedipus, as theory of becoming in A Thousand Plateaus and later as
critical-clinical methodology.
Deleuze’s discussion of psychoanalytic principles in Masochism –
Coldness and Cruelty is less polemic than in his work with Guattari.
The Freudian analysis is balanced by references to Lacan and Lagache
and draws on other philosophical and literary sources such as Reik,
Bataille, Blanchot and Klossowski.2 Thus multiple strands of Deleuze’s
philosophical and literary engagement establish in Masochism a literary
practice of libidinal symptomatology. Deleuze unearths in Masoch a
symptomatology which instantiates what Deleuze and Guattari term
schizoanalytic de-oedipalisation. Starting with the dissolution of a
perversion, masochism finally represents for Deleuze a case of negated
sexuality.
The Aims of My Project

My essay presents four interrelated processes to demonstrate a
literary practice of libidinal symptomatology within Deleuze’s frame of
masochism. I start with observations on Masoch’s literary practice, his
ethnographic and erotic intents, the notion of the law of the mother
and Masoch’s pseudo romanticism, observations from which I extract
Masoch’s libidinal principles. I turn to Deleuze’s rewriting of Freudian
masochism that he sets out as a literary symptomatology in the critical-
clinical sense (Deleuze 1997c). I draw conclusions on how this procedure
Libidinal Symptomatology in Deleuze’s Masochism 3
instantiates the triadic schizoanalytic process as set out in Deleuze and

Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, to inquire into the form and the function of
your desiring machines and simultaneously to exert a curettage of your
unconscious (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 328).3
My assumptions with regard to the literary practice of libidinal
symptomatology are that it reads the desiring symptoms on the
masochist’s body; that the narrative exemplifies a symptomatological
submission to a libidinal contract of ambiguous nature; and that
the literary expression is serialised in tableaus, namely, stationary
descriptions of masochism. The masochist’s undertaking is understood
as a libidinal experiment whereby the libidinal contract aims at a
programmatic de-oedipalisation.
Venus in Furs is thematically conceived as a memoir told with mocking
hindsight. The schizoanalytic de-oedipalisation is stylistically enacted as
phantasm and the ensuing literary practice of libidinal symptomatology
displays dissociative literary principles such as being atemporal and
ritualised, and parodic since the memoir reveals the libidinal failure of
the masochist’s experiment.
Extracting Libidinal Principles

For extracting libidinal principles I follow Deleuze’s treatise where in
eleven sections four preoccupations can be discerned. Sections I to
III elaborate imperatives, contracts, fetishism and language games and
thus set out the Deleuzian critical-clinical methodology as a specific
semiotics.4 Sections IV and V play through the oedipal situation and
execute the shift from father to mother. This is the turning point in
Deleuze’s reassessment of masochism and exemplifies the schizoanalytic
process of de-oedipalisation as it deals with the form and the function of
desiring machines and the curettage of the unconscious.5
Sections VI to VIII lay out Masoch’s literary art, his principles of
humour, gaming and the suffocating splendour of masochist scenarios.
In the concluding sections, IX to XI, Deleuze reviews the Freudian
hypothesis of the duality of instincts, of eros and thanatos, while
focusing on the death instinct. The Freudian principles of sadism
and masochism, and their assumed potential for reversal and their
combination in sadomasochism are denounced as impossible in terms
of Masoch’s and Sade’s worldviews, concerns, and literary techniques.
Deleuze elaborates his own critical-clinical symptomatology on the
grounds of a debunked masochism while rescuing Masoch’s literary
work from the psychoanalytic yoke.
4 Erika Gaudlitz
Rewriting Masochism
Deleuze’s reassessment of masochism orients itself at the Freudian
and Lacanian understanding of masochism as perversion. The focus
is on Masoch’s elaborate execution of libidinal phantasms where
an ambiguous mastery of the self is achieved by submitting to a
libidinal contract of parodic enslavement. However, the symptoms of
submissiveness and the loss of identity are ridiculed and dismissed as
a ploy to pursue an experimental liberation from the oedipal impasse.
The psychoanalytic assumption of masochism as perversion is refuted;
in Deleuze’s terms a libidinal regime of coldness and cruelty reigns in
masochism which is set under the law of the severe, oral good mother
and the denial of the father. The process of de-oedipalisation is achieved
through negating the father’s law, thus granting incest with the mother.
This is never executed in Masoch in a pornographic manner, as happens
in Sade, since Masoch transposes the stages of death and rebirth through
the mother into a mythological setting. Ancient mother rites are enacted
as simulacral phantasms, in a literary style that lends itself to libidinal
symptomatology.6
The schizoanalytic pursuit in Venus in Furs relies on libidinal
phantasms in the form of pure waiting and prolonged suspense which
have become the hallmark of masochism and, as Deleuze maintains,
in an unjustified manner singled out as the syndrome of suffering.
The masochistic instantiation embodies various avatars of Deleuze and
Guattari’s schizo whereby the corporeal symptoms of coldness and
cruelty function as the means to abolish sensuality and provoke the
deathlike stages of the body without organs.7 According to Deleuze and
Guattari’s argumentation in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus,
the schizo takes the road of schizoanalytic de-oedipalisation.8
In literary terms Masoch achieves the schizoanalytic process through
narrative dissociation and schizodicity in splitting and serialising
characters.9 The schizoanalytic curettage of the unconscious is executed
in patterns of waiting and suspense that negate and finally suspend
time.10 The process is aided by framing the story as memoir.
The instantiation of the masochist as schizo is performed by setting out
the contract of submission and experimentation. The dissociation of the
narrative and its atemporality supports the ritualisation of the schizo’s
progress in the libidinal journey while the parodic enactment of death
and rebirth, as a game of eros and thanatos, completes the process of
schizoanalytic de-oedipalisation.11
Evaluating Schizoanalysis
In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari offer several, not easily reconciled
evaluations of schizoanalysis.12 In part four of the polemical work
they propose a balance of positive and negative goals to be reached
simultaneously. If set into the frame of the first part of Anti-Oedipus
which models the process of desiring production, the positive aims of
inquiring into one’s desiring machines, their form and their function,
comprise a task of self-exploration. Triadic desiring machines act as the
propelling force of desiring production while their functions are termed
libido, numen and voluptas. The first machinic prong drives the desiring
production, the second creates the body without organs and the third
prong produces an ephemeral subject and its enjoyment (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004a: 22–3). Viewed from the processual angle, the triadic
model of libidinal functioning takes the form of actions as connection,
disjunction and consumption or consummation.
The processual evaluation in the first part of Anti-Oedipus and the
programmatic evaluation in the fourth part are strategically connected.
What sets the later evaluation apart is the negative task of schizoanalysis
as curettage of one’s unconscious. The scouring of the unconscious
demands a shift from the phallic, oedipal ‘line of castration’ to a
‘matrical fissure’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 328–9). The promotion
of the schizo as the result of a successful process of schizophrenisation
and de-oedipalisation figures in all parts of Anti-Oedipus and is aligned
with the creation of the body without organs while the link between
the schizo’s instantiation and the curettage of the unconscious demands
further inquiry.
Another thread within the theorisation of schizoanalysis evokes the
unconscious as orphan and producer (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a:
328–9) that refutes the Freudian idea that the unconscious is created
by repressed ideas engendered in the process of oedipalisation.13
In Deleuze’s libidinal theory, desiring machines as the acting parts of
desiring production are evoked in the literary work of Hölderlin, Kleist,
Lenz, Artaud, Kafka, Proust and Masoch (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a:
22–3). The process of positive schizophrenisation, producing the scoured
schizo, is the theoretical link to the aesthetic-literary aspect of Deleuze
and Guattari’s schizoanalysis. The named writers and some philosophers
such as Nietzsche and Spinoza present in their work, topically and
stylistically, libidinal features which symptomatically express their
avoidance of ingrained discursive patterns. These singular figures
6 Erika Gaudlitz
demonstrate a libidinal intensity symptomatic of the flux of desire;

infinite becomings pointing to an oedipal liberation; a desertification
of style resulting from a scoured unconscious, and a challenging
liminality.14 These exceptional features become for Deleuze, and Deleuze
and Guattari, literary strategies of a libidinal symptomatology whereby
symptoms as corporeal signs express the forms and stages of becoming.
II. Observations – Masoch’s Literary Practice

For Deleuze, Masoch is a writer of great merit, an accomplished
stylist, who demands to be rescued from the psychoanalytic masochist
syndrome. Two unjustified charges need attention: that Masoch’s name
was adopted for a perversion while his literary work fell into neglect
and that his writing was aligned with Sade’s, making it complementary
and reciprocal to sadism, consequently theorising a dialectical unity
of sadomasochism.15 Two aesthetic-literary tasks ensue from these
charges, to free the literariness of Masoch’s work from the stigma of
perversion and to disband the semiotic howler of sadomasochism: ‘we
are questioning the very concept of an entity known as sadomasochism’
(Deleuze 2006: 13). The worldviews of Masoch and Sade and their
literary techniques are dissimilar, thus forbidding any speculation of
comparison, reciprocity, or possible fusion. This thesis can of course
not be followed in detail in this essay. My emphasis is on Masoch
to disentangle the literary from the perverted, at instances accounting
for Deleuze’s parallel reasoning, which allows demonstrating that the
schizoanalytic difference in Masoch and Sade originates in their literary
texts. While the clinical views of Krafft-Ebing and Freud borrow from
the literary texts to establish their theories of psychic and corporeal
symptoms of masochism and sadism, Deleuze takes an alternate road:
The critical (in the literary sense) and the clinical (in the medical sense) may be
destined to enter into a new relationship of mutual learning. Symptomatology
is always a question of art; the clinical specifications of sadism and masochism
are not separable from the literary values peculiar to Sade and Masoch. In
place of a dialectic which all too readily perceives the link between opposites,
we should aim for a critical appraisal able to reveal the truly differential
mechanisms as well as the artistic originalities. (Deleuze 2006: 14)
A balanced critical-clinical appraisal affords a rescue of Masoch’s

originality in demonstrating his libidinal vision of the new man. Once
disentangled, masochism can illustrate the schizoanalytic principles in
Masoch’s text that also mean working toward a specific Deleuzian
aesthetic. The schizoanalytic core presents itself in the persona of the

schizo in its masochistic guise. The masochist as a schizo may turn out
to be a liberated sensualist, a de-oedipalised pervert.
The Ethnographic Intent

Deleuze is drawn to Masoch, as to Kafka and Beckett, by the
ethnographic evocation in the work.16 Masoch, of mixed racial origin,
is situated in the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire of the second
half of the nineteenth century and blends multiple ethnic customs in
his Galician, Jewish, Hungarian and Prussian tales. However, Masoch’s
ethnographic intent is enlarged by his visionary concept of a sexualised
history that directly leads into Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic
project.
The Erotic Intent

The masochian style mingles historical and political intrigue with
nationalistic ideas and blends mysticism with phantasised eroticism,
‘forming a nebula around the scenes of flagellation’ (Deleuze 2006:
10). The fusion of mysticism and eroticism points to experimenting
with the body’s potentiality. Sensual diffusion and mystical martyrdom,
considered as side effects of masochism, can be regarded as symptoms of
bodily experimentation. The masochist symptoms of assumed perversion
such as desired humiliation and punishment, and animal disguise, cannot
be singled out as sexual rites, they rather express surfacing symptoms
of libidinal strategies that run counter to gratification. The corporeal
strategies of the masochist lead to negating sexuality. Not the action
of fantasised flagellation is of interest but tracing the motivation for
wanting to be humiliated since it accesses the psychic agenda behind
the acts of gaming.
Masoch replaces sexual acts, found in repetitive abundance in Sade,
with elaborate scenarios that shift from bodily action to phantasised
staging. The literary devices of enactments, disguises and role shifting
make up masochism’s theatricality. Libidinal events staged as parodic
tableaus supersede sensual pursuits. The principal erotic intent, the
Freudian masochist indicator of fetishisation, the donning of furs, the
application of whips, the eroticisation of shoes and other vestiary items,
isolates single aspects without considering why they are deployed. The
frame needs to be considered which defines the schizoanalytic intent in
the masochist journey towards becoming a schizo, or new man.
8 Erika Gaudlitz
Naming Masoch’s bodily techniques as masochism ignores the blend

of ethnographic and historical engagement with erotic intrigue, as a
schizoanalytic crossover of social and personal desire. Anguish and
suffocating tightness express affective states of intensity, bodily and
communally, which reach beyond the syndrome of masochism to which
they have been restricted.
Masoch’s Venus in Furs perfectly blends the mystical and the political
and is part of The Legacy of Cain, a cycle of interlinked themes of love,
property, money, the State [sic], war and death. The programmatic title
of the cycle spells out the human legacy of suffering. The biblical Cain
loathed and rejected by the cold mother over the preferred Abel bears the
mark after killing the brother. In Deleuze’s reading, the cycle’s concealed
theme is the masochist’s mythical core, the new man.17
The Law of the Mother

The linchpin of the libidinal reversal in the masochist is the shift to
the law of the mother freeing him from the oedipal enforcement. The
literary enactment draws together mythological elements, imaginary
personae18 and mystical aspects of medieval and romantic provenance.
Deleuze adopts Bachofen’s ideas which propose a triadic model of
femininity: Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, Roman Venus, represents
the pagan hetaera and Demeter the oedipal mother while the oral mother
(Bachofen 1967; Deleuze 2006: 52–5) features the masochist’s desired
attributes of coldness and cruelty, embodying neither sexuality nor
procreation but the natural principle of nurture and death.
While Deleuze is led by Masoch’s texts, in a bold gesture and drawing
on psychoanalytic sources, he reconceptualises the triadic model in terms
of the maternal (Deleuze 2006: 63):19 the primitive mother is equated
with Aphrodite, the oedipal mother still parallels Demeter, yet the oral
mother embodies the masochian steppe,20 an ideal of coldness, solicitude
and finality, death. The last type, an invention of Masoch’s imagination,
mediates between the uterine (primitive) and the oedipal mother.21
Such a strategic move frees the process of de-oedipalisation from
Freudian references. The oral mother as natural principle, desexualised
and idealised, becomes legitimately accessible to incestuous desire.
Deleuze’s speculative gesture opens a new reading of the masochist
rituals such as hunting, celebrating fertility, regeneration and rebirth in
their mythological phrasing. The interpretative move circumvents the
Freudian homosexual aetiology of masochism, namely, the son desiring
to take the mother’s position towards the father. Deleuze follows other
speculative hypotheses on masochism22 offering supplementary roads

out of the Freudian oedipal conflict.
In Venus in Furs, the masochist’s journey is already completed. The
new man is cured, seemingly freed from sexuality of a masochist, sadist
or sadomasochist kind, either having failed in his experimentation or
accomplished the schizoanalytic journey to its goal of curettage of the
unconscious, a goal that is humorously deflated at the end of Venus in
Furs. In Deleuzian terms, the completed process is a shift in reading
sexuality in that it exemplifies Masoch’s way of ‘desexualising love’
and simultaneously ‘sexualising the entire history of humanity’ (Deleuze
2006: 11–2, 37–8, 53, 79–80, 93, 96–7). Libidinality is lived in fantasies
under the concept of ‘pornology’ (Deleuze 2006: 18, 22, 29), the art of
parodying the libidinal principles to overcome desire.
Pseudo Romanticism
Stylistically, the blend of mysticism and eroticism represents Masoch’s
romanticism since he borrows topoi such as dreamscapes, moonlit park
scenes, evocative paintings and the metaphor of travelogue to Italy. The
characteristics of masochism, excess, cultivated anxiety, exhibitionism
of pain, suffering and martyrdom (Deleuze 2006: 33–4, 69, 70–1, 133),
are clothed in pseudo romantic ways. Excessive fantasies erode Masoch’s
texts from the inside, thus voiding them of realistic details. Phantasy
as the libidinal principle of masochism reigns in dreamt, dramatised
and ritualised scenarios. The romanticising experience of the masochist
exemplifies the schizo’s attitude of liberation where libidinal strength is
gained out of affective denial.
III. Extraction – Masoch’s Libidinal Principles

Libidinal symptomatology in literary texts identifies ritualised signs of
desire.23 The discursive handling of symptoms eventuates dissociatively
in a schizoid manner as distorted discourse, and in a parodic manner
since the distortion is reflected upon. A serialisation takes place whereby
the meanings supersede each other. Libidinality is here understood as the
force of desire, and libidinal as defining the action of desiring in the
sense that the anoedipal unconscious expresses itself. The challenge of
Masoch’s texts lies in locating the discursive means that express his
libidinal intentionality.
The literary text needs to be taken as the origin of the schizoanalytic
difference. The critical approach proceeds from observations in the text
10 Erika Gaudlitz
rather than clinically isolating the corporeal symptoms of masochism

such as enjoying pain as pleasure. The critical-clinical as a specific
semiotics in the service of schizoanalysis singles out stylistic indicators
of masochism such as the use of imperatives, commands and orders; the
imposition and manipulation of libidinal contracts; the expressive and
imaginative use of fetishism and disguise; and the staging of elaborate
rituals and language games.
Accordingly, Deleuze proposes to shift from concentrating on the
expressions of masochist pain–pleasure in the text, as symptoms or
corporeal signs for the perversion of masochism or sadism, to focusing
on their functionality (Deleuze 2006: 35). The undercurrent of violence
in both, masochism and sadism, is part of the questioned functionality
of the symptoms relating to thanatos (the Death Instinct).
Imperatives and Libidinal Contracts

Deleuze is asking whether Masoch’s language is excessive or rather
expertly used on a second order level in a manipulative manner for
distinct purposes (Deleuze 2006: 19–20). In sadism this means to engage
in the position of victim and not of torturer but in a reflective position
on torture. In masochism this means to engage in a schizoid manner
in two rhetorical positions simultaneously: taking up, or pretending to
take up, the position of victim and slipping into the position of torturer,
however as the torturer to oneself. The double-pronged engagement in
masochism is further complicated, since the masochist in Venus in Furs
reflects on past experiences, having achieved the humorously refuted
libidinal change.24
The doubled position of the masochist reveals a self-manipulation for
the purpose of self-control and self-annihilation whereby it is difficult to
draw a line between the positions. Imperatives, commands and orders
function as discursive means to handle the libidinal split. The woman
is trained, educated and persuaded, also against her own wishes and
will, to act and function as cruel despot while ultimately the masochist
controls the libidinal scheme in projecting in a manipulative schizoid
manner part of his own actions onto the woman.
Arbitrary contracts set out the rules that install discipline and ensure
the functionality of the imposed order. Both actors are aware of the
impossibility to enforce the rules, yet willingly abide by them. The
libidinal contract imposes strict clauses on the masochist: slavery,
name change and loss of identity, total obedience, utter submission to
chastisement and whimsical maltreatment, sacrificial killing, and after
remittance the denial of vengeance and reprisal (Deleuze 2006: 220,

277–9). A final supplementary clause takes the form of a self-addressed
suicide note (Deleuze 2006: 221).25 The masochist contract aims at
anonymity. The wilful ordering streamlines all actions to a ritual directed
at the mastery of the vacillating split self, thus enforcing the persuasive
negation of the masochist process. In terms of the schizoanalytic project,
this reflects the process of the curettage of the unconscious while
simultaneously exploring, and controlling, the form and function of
masochist desiring machines.
However, while the outer frame of the actions is ordered by contract
and ritual, the inner fabric of the actions abounds in fantasies, centred
on the libidinal powers of the body. The woman’s task is governance in
coldness and cruelty, excluding sexual, sensual or emotional gratification
while the masochist’s desire is directed at heightened sensibility, yet
in a phantasised and mystical manner. The sensual achievement is
not found in experiential realisation but in artistic representation, in
paintings, sculptures and dreamscapes.26 The elaborate use of paintings
lends Masoch’s text a deliberate aestheticism incorporating elements
of mythmaking and fetishism (Deleuze 2006: 148–9). Humiliation and
punishment intend to negate the flesh and to conquer its libidinal
demands in lived supersensualism (Deleuze 2006: 21, 69).27
Fetishism and Disguise

In schizoanalytic terms, the masochist’s libidinal aim is establishing
the body without organs understood as affective force field. The fur-
clad woman, considered the ultimate idea of fetishisation, is idealised
in paintings. In agreement with the schizoanalytic demand of Anti-
Oedipus, the gender roles are blurred. However, to conceive of an
enforced masculinisation of the woman as master despot and a self-
inflicted feminisation of the man is unsatisfactory since the masochist
inhabits the schizoid double role of instigator. Deleuze proposes that the
masochist turns into a hermaphrodite, absorbing both gender roles and
shifting effortlessly from one role to the other.28 The transmutations are
enacted on several levels, with reversals and duplications that establish
the dissociative discourse in Masoch’s texts. As directed phantasy, the
scenarios are purely imaginative (Deleuze 2006: 184–9). Libidinality in
Masoch is directed at the body’s sensibility, not its sexuality, excludes
the orgasmic intent and thus achieves the libidinal liberation from the
oedipal scheme.
12 Erika Gaudlitz
The abolition of gendered roles eventuates as a game of roles, practices

and functions (Deleuze 2006: 22).29 Deleuze argues for a manipulative
technique of dialectical disguise within the masochist’s scheme with the
intent of practising libidinal liberation. The dissociative structure of
Masoch’s texts does not allow the reader to predict the final gender
of the acted out roles as they shift incessantly, which could be termed
the masochist’s schizoid ventriloquism (Deleuze 2006: 22) since the
pseudo victim has educated the torturer to speak through a ‘borrowed’
mouth. Deleuze proposes that pornological language, because of its
self-reflection, confronts language with its own limits, and thus is
a ‘nonlanguage’ (Deleuze 2006: 22–3) or counter-language (Deleuze
2006: 37) in that the practice speaks while eclipsing the eroticism.
Masoch’s discourse is internally split in that the imperatives become
impersonal devices of governance directed at breaking the bodily limits.
The masochist’s rituals function as literary or discursive schemes since
they are never acted out but purely phantasised.
Rituals and Language Games

The evasion of eroticism does not prevent calling the masochist’s
fantasies monstrous, yet Masoch is never obscene, as is the case with
Sade, but elusive. An undercurrent of dread and suffocation contributes
to the feeling of suspense. A stifling ambiance pervades the imaginary
spaces and localities, which is mistaken for masochist eroticism, while
Deleuze insists on masochism’s innocence, unfortunately destroyed
by Krafft-Ebing’s restrictive clinical handling of its symptoms. The
masochist’s body hovers in an undetermined state, expecting the beating
or whipping in a mood of unending waiting. The body turns into a
network of suspended nerves halted in the position of expectation, being
neither alive nor dead, but rather a body without organs, conceived
as the idealised schizoanalytic body. Both figures in the schizoanalytic
assemblage of masochism, reciprocally ungendered, relate to each other
in a dialectical fashion, particularly when reflected in mirrors that distort
their natural proportions. Their interdependence is sustained by the
arbitrary but wilfully binding contract, adhered to on honour, with
playfully given word and signature.
The question arises how to explain the function of the contractual
relation with regard to what it delivers for the masochist. In Deleuze’s
hypothesis, a potential explanation (Deleuze 2006: 30–1) leads to
Freud’s speculative discussion of life and death instinct(s), eros and
thanatos. Both instincts are assumed to be inseparably linked in the
unconscious whereby thanatos presents silence, the nothing, the void,

and can only be spoken of in speculative or mythical terms (Deleuze
2006: 30). While the death instinct can be described in terms of
annihilation because of its inseparability from the life instinct, eros, the
erotic component is slanted towards several types of denial, as negation,
foreclosure and disavowal.
In the Lacanian reading, foreclosure is conceived as a sideways shift
and imagined in terms of displaced layers of libidinal sedimentation.
Deleuze’s reading emphasises the origin of disavowal in a suspension
of belief that shapes a new situation (Deleuze 2006: 31) where the
replacement takes the form of fetishism. The fetish is a simulacral,
imagist event or phantasm; it exorcises but also remains as a halted,
frozen, arrested image. Freud’s phrasing: ‘yes, there is nothing there
but no, there is – I know but . . . ’ circumscribes the ambiguity of the
situation. The fetish turns into a protective device for neutralising the
shock of realised absence of the phallus. The process of disavowal is so
extensive that any sensuality must be postponed and disavowed which
creates the symptomatological libidinality characteristic of the Deleuzian
schizoanalytic project. The masochist is caught in a schizoid position;
the pleasure is experienced in the denial of its experience with the result
of the ‘new sexless man’ (Deleuze 2006: 33; original emphasis) or, even
more ambiguously termed, the ‘new Man devoid of sexual love’ (Deleuze
2006: 128; original emphasis).
Now, the strategic reflection on the stylistic indicators of masochism,
imperatives and contracts as well as rituals and fetishism, has to be
aligned with the critical-clinical project in the service of schizoanalysis.
In Masoch, the moments of suspense are the climactic moments (Deleuze
2006: 33). Suspense replaces the climax, and phantasm functions as the
literary device in the masochist replacement. Suspense is acted out as
a halting of postures that transform the woman despot into a painting,
statue or dreamscape. The process of hesitation and lingering is captured
in artistic tableaus that offer the tranquillity of death and eternity
while serialisation prolongs the desired suspense. The suffocation in
masochism stems from the shifts and displacements effected in a circular
motion. Masoch’s texts then are devoted to the play of phantasy, to
suspense, artful suggestion and avoidance of libidinal fulfilment.
Art, Contract and Ritual, Law

Masoch draws on the arts of painting and sculpture as inspiration for the
masochist’s phantasm. Venus in Furs, in an analogy to Titian’s painting,
14 Erika Gaudlitz
represents a woman in the act of observed self-reflection, mirroring

herself while being captured by the painter in this doubled act. Hair and
fur wrapping express the desired masochist supersensuality that gives
the title to reformed Severin’s memoir: Confessions of a Supersensualist
(Deleuze 2006: 151). The painterly unreality dissociates the fantasised
actions and estranges the bodily processes. The experienced affectivity
is transferred into a trans-substantiated realm that Masoch terms
supersensualism (Deleuze 2006: 21, 69), a conjunction of coldness
and cruelty, and sentimentality (Deleuze 2006: 91). In this process of
disembowelment and loss of organicity the sensations of the flesh are
overcome.
The masochist’s intent is to perceive himself and his woman double
in a fleeting moment of fetishistic recognition. Desired is not the living
body with its sensations but the potential undercutting of sensations.
Waiting is captured as arrested movement and expresses a momentary
deathlike instance that allows heightened sensibility beyond the one
granted by actions.30 The masochist intends to reach a pure state of
waiting that, in Deleuze’s understanding, should define masochism
(Deleuze 2006: 70–1).
Waiting is split in a schizoid manner: what is awaited is
simultaneously postponed and thus renounced, and what is expected
is already past and foregone. The seesawing of the senses between the
postponed and the expected creates the masochist’s, indeed the schizo’s,
doubled pain–pleasure rhythm where pain and pleasure are the fleeting
outer symptoms of the desired inner splitting of the senses. Masochism
thus understood elaborates a scheme of libidinal symptomatology. The
entanglement of the two aspects of sensibility, of expectation and
renunciation, makes masochism a state of bodily experimentation, an
experiential constellation.
The scheme of phantasm can be structured in five stages as disavowal,
suspense, waiting, fetishism and fantasy. The phantasm creates its
own temporality and is sustained by the imaginary fetish which is
never the real but always the already replaced object and core of the
phantasm.31 The fetish is the driving force of the fantasy, spurs the
suspense, contributes to the static power of the scenario and maintains
the balance between disavowed outer reality and fantasised inner
reality.
Deleuze speaks against a material and moral and for a formal
and deductive model of masochism. He principally accepts Reik’s
characteristics of masochism (Deleuze 2006: 74–5),32 yet regrets the
exclusion of the masochistic contract. Deleuze anchors the contractual
aspect of masochism in Masoch’s notion of culturalism (Deleuze 2006:

76) where art and suspense perform the aesthetic side and contract
and submission sustain the juridical side. The combination of writing
and law warrants the ascendancy from a lower nature to the great
nature viewed as sentimental and self-conscious (Deleuze 2006: 76, cf.
27–8). The idea of ascendency relates to the schizoanalytic angle in
masochism since initiating the contract removes the original conditions
of life (Deleuze 2006: 77–8). In Deleuze’s evaluation, both, Sade and
Masoch, are revolutionary writers as their pornological codes overthrow
individual barriers. Both writers create literary schemes of superseding
the oedipal conflict and their ensuing libidinal symptomatologies invent
new conceptions of the body.
The phantasm of ambiguous mastery encompasses the first stage
of schizoanalytic de-oedipalisation33 while the second stage is reached
through the phantasmatic abolition of sensuality. The third stage takes
place in the libidinal shift to the law of the mother and the denial of
the oedipal father. This last stage challenges liminality and death and
exemplifies Masoch’s literary practice of libidinal symptomatology with
a parodic exposure of corporeality, of what a body can do.
Following Lacan, ‘the law is the same as repressed desire’ (Deleuze
2006: 85); in both cases the object remains equally concealed, their
object is unknowable and elusive.34 While in Freudian understanding35
the repression of the instinctual drives creates conscience and leads into
the oedipal conflict, Masoch aims at the subversion of the law (Deleuze
2006: 89). Deleuze reads masochism and sadism as attempts, literally
and imaginatively, to turn the law upside down.
The masochist is a jester and his buffoonery is symptomatic of
disavowal, suspense and fantasy. As obsequious as the masochist
appears, his insolence overrides the apparent compliance; his submission
is pure seeming. ‘In short, he [the masochist] is a humorist
[sic], a logician of consequences, just as the ironic sadist is a
logician of principles’ (Deleuze 2006: 89). The humorous display
of oedipal absurdity makes masochism a form of modern libidinal
symptomatology. Both assumed perversions are experimental trials if
not full successes of breaking the oedipal issue. In masochism, the law
is transferred to and invested in the mother who expels the father from
the symbolic realm (Deleuze 2006: 89–90). The new symbolic with its
new de-oedipalised law functions in the image of the mother, named
by Deleuze the new maternal symbolic or ‘intermaternal’ symbolic if the
three mother images are taken into account (Deleuze 2006: 63). Stepping
up the severity of conditions in the contract is a strategy to make them
16 Erika Gaudlitz
look ridiculous. The contract is revealed as a deliberate caricature, a

farce of self-enslavement and a literary hyperbole.
IV. Instantiation – Deleuze Enacting the Schizoanalytic Process

Deleuze finally debunks the semiological howler of sadomasochism
(Deleuze 2006: 128–9) in following the splitting of eros and thanatos
and, in particular, the psychic mechanism in the process of defusion, or
desexualisation, between sadistic superego and masochistic narcissistic
ego.36 The masochist is revealed as the ultimate dissimulator, a hermes
trismegistus (triple master of disguise). The masochist ego pretends to be
weak but ultimately triumphs, if secretly. The displayed submission is a
strategic move of negative persuasion by which the masochist achieves
the schizoanalytic act of liberation, yet the abolition of the father creates
a void that is filled by an overpowering masochist ego supported by a
sentimental attitude and phantasms.
The Critical-Clinical as a Semiotics

The critical-clinical balances two interrelated processes, the literary text
under the critical regime and the libidinal clinical observation on the
masochist’s body. The resulting semiotics focuses on the masochist’s
schizoanalytic trajectory. While postponement, ritualisation and parody
function as affective parameters of the masochist practice, the libidinal
phantasms accomplish an ambiguous mastery since they are enacted
on a level of dissimulation and pretence. The critical-clinical approach
as a semiotics in the service of schizoanalysis employs Masoch’s
stylistic devices: the use of imperatives, commands and orders, arbitrary
ritualised libidinal contracts, fetishism and disguises. The characteristics
of the masochistic strategy are an insolent attitude and humour as acts
of defiance, covered by a simulated strategic submission.
Deleuzian Libidinal Symptomatology

Deleuze is aware of the monstrosity in both subversions acting out
their libidinal symptomatology.37 In both cases, the self-control aims at
liberating libidinal energy. In masochism the oedipal father is exposed
as a caricature, what is beaten out of the masochist is the father’s image.
The masochist then is a split psychic event, a schizo disavowing and
denying his own image.
The masochist journey of liberation takes the schizoanalytic road

which leads from disavowal to suspense and finally to a liberation from
the superego. The moment of suspense allows the vision that the oral
mother possesses the phallus and the power of regeneration. Deleuze
proposes, speculatively, that this moment is the event of the newborn
ego, the rebirth of the new man through the agency of the maternal
phallus (Deleuze 2006: 33, 128). The act of rebirth as a psychic event
achieves the schizoanalytic goal of the curettage of the unconscious.
The masochist is an ideal schizo since he experiences through
his contractual ordeal the split in the ego (Deleuze 2006: 130–1).
Masochism as a literary device demonstrates in symptoms the
schizoanalytic journey towards liberation from the oedipal yoke in the
form of a mythical retelling. The masochist is in Deleuze’s reading a
sentimental ‘visionary’ by contrast to the calculating ‘thinker’ of sadism
(Deleuze 2006: 132).
In pursuing a differential diagnosis of both psychic mechanisms
Deleuze demonstrates that they are solutions to the Oedipus and
thus establish a specific territory of schizoanalysis. Masoch’s coldness
is balanced by sentimentality while Sade’s torpor and unconcern
demonstrate calculating coldness. Both psychic mechanisms need to be
considered not as psychoanalytic categories but as literary genres in their
own right.
Evaluating Schizoanalysis – Revisited

Masoch’s literary work achieves a transfer from the libidinal domain
to that of the schizoanalytic project of social–political curettage by
means of a ‘sexualisation of world history’ (Deleuze 2006: 12, 53).
Four pathways to solving the schizoanalytic problematic can be taken.
The first inroad with regard to the oedipal conflict concerns the
rewriting of history as sexualised history. The second inroad with
regard to the law of the mother deals with strengthening bodily powers.
Two aligned trajectories are engaged in the schizoanalytic journey of
the masochist assemblage. The masochistic balance of coldness and
sentiment reflects the affective network of the body without organs,
only fleetingly established while inwardly sentimentality functions as
generative principle of the new de-oedipalised order. The third inroad
elaborates the new maternal symbolic which as differential libidinal
strategy allows understanding obscured symptoms. The fourth inroad,
the parodic enactment of death and rebirth as a game of eros and
thanatos, completes the schizoanalytic de-oedipalisation and creates the
18 Erika Gaudlitz
mode of an anoedipal unconscious since we observe the processes of a

projected schizoanalytic curettage of the unconscious.
A masochistic map of the schizoanalytic problematic can be discerned
in drawing the points impacting on the schizoanalytic project together.
While the schizoanalytic process is phrased and framed by Masoch as
literary fantasy, in a bold challenge to thanatos, the ritualisation and
the contractual scheme allow experimenting with schizoanalytic themes
such as the body without organs, death and rebirth, libidinal fluidity, and
the dissolution of sexual boundaries. Masochism read in terms of literary
fantasy displays the full spectrum of symptoms which a schizoanalytic
journey of de-oedipalisation produces.
Notes
1. Cf. Deleuze [1994; 1977; 1973] 1997a: 183–92; Deleuze [1989] 1997b: 53–5;
Deleuze [1967] 2004c: 131–4. See for exegesis: David-Ménard 2005; Bogue
2007: 107–12; Alliez 2010: 117–30; Geyskens 2010: 103–15.
2. Cf. Freud 1919: SE, XVII, 175–204; 1924: SE, XIX, 159–70. Lacan [1963]
2006: 645–68; see for exegesis: Baas 2003: 34–66; Verhaeghe 2007: 29–49.
Reik [1941/1949] 1962. Bataille 1985; see for exegesis: Shaviro 1990; Hill 2001;
Kaufman 2001. Blanchot 1989. Klossowski 2007; see for exegesis: Deleuze
2004a: 280–301.
3. ‘Oedipus [. . . ] led to the point of autocritique; [. . . ] the necessity of a scouring of
the unconscious, schizoanalysis as a curettage of the unconscious [. . . ]’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004a: 328–9).
4. The Proust treatise (Deleuze 2000) sets out four sign systems: classes of society,
love and sexuality, the senses, and the arts, read as a symptomatological
diagnostic of the crumbling pre-World War I society. See for exegesis: Beistegui
[2007] 2012.
5. ‘It is the function of the libido to invest the social field in unconscious forms,
thereby hallucinating all history, reproducing in delirium entire civilisations [sic],
races, and continents, and intensely “feeling” the becoming of the world [. . . ]’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 108).
6. Cf. Deleuze 2004a: 280–301. See for exegesis: Blanchot 1997: 169–82; D. W.
Smith 2012: 325–38.
7. Cf. Sontag 1981: 11–70. See for exegesis: Chiesa 2006: 336–64; Dolar 2006:
312–35.
8. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 165–84.
9. Inside the framing (Deleuze 2006: 143–50, 270–1) four scenarios are staged:
Carpathia (151–204), Austria and Italy (205–35), and Florence (236–46,
247–69), each centring on the third rival of the masochistic assemblage: the
Russian prince, Prince Corsini, the German painter, and ‘the Greek’.
10. Through repetition the unconscious is drawn into actualisation that occurs
habitually in a passive manner; then libidinally and in memory, evoked as eros
and mnemosyne (Deleuze 2004b: 133–9), and finally in obeying the death drive,
evoked as thanatos (Deleuze 2004b: 135–40).
11. Cf. for libido and libidinal drives, 29th Series (Deleuze 2004d: 233–40); for
death rather than eros and thanatos, 21st Series (169–75, esp. 172–4). Freud
did not use the term thanatos or rarely (Laplanche and Pontalis 2006: 447).
The 29th Series examines the Oedipus while drawing on Freud 1920: SE,
XVIII, 1–64; 1923: SE, XIX, 1–66, and Blanchot’s double notion of death
(Blanchot 1989).
12. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 108, 293–4, 301–421. For Kafka, see Deleuze
and Guattari 2004a: 212–3, 216, 231–3. See for exegesis: Deleuze and Guattari
2006: 43–52, 72–80. For schizoanalysis see: Holland 1993; Genosko 1998:
175–90; Buchanan 2000; Genosko 2002; Holland [1999] 2005; Watson 2009:
1–14. See for exegesis: Bosteels 1998: 145–74. See Guattari 2011, 2013.
13. ‘If repetition makes us ill, it also heals us; if it enchains and destroys us, it also
frees us, testifying in both cases to its “demonic” power. All cure is a voyage to
the bottom of repetition’ (Deleuze 2004b: 20–1). Deleuze draws on Freud 1914:
SE, XII, 145–56; 1920: SE, XVIII, 1–64.
14. Cf. for exegesis: Buydens 2005; Gaudlitz 2010: 183–205; Gaudlitz 2011;
Zourabichvili 2012.
15. Cf. Krafft-Ebing 1959. Freud 1919: SE, XVII, 175–204 (early stance); 1924: SE,
XIX, 159–70; 1927: SE, XXI, 147–58 (later stance). Grunberger 1979; Deleuze
2006: 37–46. There is a persistent interest in masochism and sadomasochism
running counter to Deleuze’s propositions. Cf. Byrne 2014. See for exegesis:
Finke and Niekerk (eds) 2000; Van Haute and Geyskens 2012.
16. Cf. Deleuze 2006: 9–14, 38. See Bensmaïa [1975] 2006: ix–xxi. Deleuze
proposes that the 1848 revolutions across Europe serve as background to
Masoch’s writings as the French revolution (1789–91) does to Sade’s works.
17. ‘The two principal male figures in Masoch’s work are Cain and Christ [. . . ]
Christ is not the son of God, but the new Man [sic]; his likeness to the father
is abolished, he is “Man on the Cross, who knows no sexual love, no property,
no fatherland, no cause, no work . . . ”’ (Deleuze 2006: 96–100, 131). See for
messianic and cabbalist themes, Sabattai Zwi and self-mortification: Deleuze
2006: 98–9, 177–80.
18. Cf. Deleuze 2006: 222–4, 232–3.
19. Deleuze does not quote Bachofen (1967) but follows Gordon 1946. For ‘the
sexualisation of world history’, see Deleuze 2006: 37–8. For the procedure from
‘schema’ to ‘problem’, see Deleuze 2006: 53, 273–6.
20. Masoch represents Nature as steppe, sea and mother. For the world-historical
reading, see Deleuze 2006: 54. Deleuze follows Bergler’s thesis that the core of
masochism is the oral mother (Deleuze 2006: 55, 63). See Bergler 1959.
21. Masoch’s notion of ‘the true Samartian Woman’ typifies the masochist situation:
‘she wears furs, she wields a whip, she treats men as slaves’ (Deleuze 2006:
47, 273–6). Deleuze amalgamates insights from Masoch’s work, Bachofen’s
historical criteria and Bergler’s psychoanalytic speculations (Deleuze 2006:
50–5).
22. (1) Aulagnier’s thesis (no date) restores an active role to the mother. For Lacan,
foreclosure operates in connection with the father (the Name-of-the-Father). (2)
Gordon’s thesis (1946) on sexual initiation and religious evolution is indebted to
Bachofen. (3) Grunberger’s psychodynamic theory of masochism (1954/1979)
does not accept the maternal–oral aetiology Deleuze espouses in following
Bergler. (4) Lagache’s (Lacanian) thesis (no date) is based on the structure of
the personality. (5) Klossowski’s literary work focuses on the difference between
sadistic and masochistic prostitution fantasies. Deleuze draws on a wide range
of texts but does not provide exact sources for Aulagnier and Lagache. See
Deleuze’s endnotes Nos 11, 13, 15, 18, 33 and 41 (Deleuze 2006: 135–8). See
Bachofen 1967; Grunberger 1979; Klossowski 2007.
23. ‘Desire or delirium [. . . ] is [. . . ] a libidinal investment of an entire historical
milieu, of an entire social environment. What makes one delirious are classes,
20 Erika Gaudlitz
peoples, races, masses, mobs. [. . . ] We say that the schizophrenic has to deal not
with the family, nor with his parents, but with peoples, populations, and tribes.
We say that the unconscious is not a matter of generations or family genealogy,
but rather of world population, and that the psychoanalytic machine destroys
all this’ (Deleuze [1973] 2004a: 274–80, 275). See for exegesis: Girard 2001:
679–712.
24. Deleuze draws on Reik who insists that the mother image is the father in disguise.
‘The Greek’ acting in accordance with the woman is a second level substitute for
the father. For Deleuze the masochist is not ‘disillusioned’ but ‘disfantasized’
[sic] (Deleuze 2006: 65).
25. The first contract states established habits in the masochist assemblage; Severin’s
response to the supplementary contract asking for suicide elicits hesitation and
doubt: ‘A profound horror gripped me on reading these lines’ (Deleuze 2006:
221).
26. Severin’s libidinal status is mirrored in mythological scenarios: Titian Venus
with the Mirror; paintings by Raphael, Carravaggio and Rembrandt; artistic
stories: Manon Lescaut and the Chevalier. The statue of Venus (or Aphrodite
of Milo), cold and eternalised (Deleuze 2006: 153), embodies the ideal woman.
Dreamscapes evoke romantic settings (Deleuze 2006: 156–7), taking on a darker
mood when the libidinal trajectory changes (Deleuze 2006: 214).
27. The Deleuzian expression of ‘supersensuous sentimentality’ draws on Masoch’s
allusion to Goethe’s Faust where Mephistopheles (the devil) taunts Faust
for claiming to be ‘supersensual’ (übersinnlich) while giving in to his
impulsive attraction to Margarete (Gretchen) (Deleuze 2006: 151, 178–9, 188).
Supersensuality can be read as supercarnality, conform to the theological
perception of flesh, sensualitas (Deleuze 2006: 21). At instances, Deleuze equates
idealism and supersensualism in Masoch (Deleuze 2006: 32). The combination
of flesh and feeling in ‘supersensuous sentimentality’ expresses an aspect of
libidinal symptomatology where the inner feeling (sentimentality) struggles with
the outer flesh (sensuality). Deleuze reads this as the icy coldness of the woman-
torturer and later in terms of the split of eros and thanatos (inner heat and outer
coldness).
28. Cf. the fluid gender roles in Masoch’s story of the adventure with Ludwig II
(Deleuze 2006: 281–93).
29. Deleuze identifies the father in two roles, within the masochist assemblage and
in the third rival, the sadistic transvestite man. Masoch’s life and work were
dominated by finding the ideal woman-torturer and the third party, called ‘the
Greek’ (or Apollo) (Deleuze 2006: 11, 48, 64, 66). ‘ “In Paris he has been seen
dressed up as a woman, and men were showering him with love letters”. The
second aspect is virile and marks on the contrary the end of the fantasy and of
the masochistic exercise’ (Deleuze 2006: 64). For the full fantasised situation,
see Deleuze 2006: 250.
30. In some masochian novels the acts of suspension are acted out as scenes of
hanging and crucifixion.
31. Deleuze cites a typical masochist fantasy: ‘a woman in shorts is pedaling [sic]
energetically on a stationary bicycle; the subject is lying under the bicycle, the
whirring pedals almost brushing him, his palms pressed against the woman’s
calves [. . . ] All the elements are conjoined in this image, from the fetishism of
the woman’s calf to the twofold waiting represented by the motion of the pedals
and the immobility of the bicycle’ (Deleuze 2006: 72). Another example has
Masoch arranging to have a healthy tooth pulled while his wife, dressed in furs,
stands before him with a threatening air.
32. Cf. Reik 1962: 44–91; Deleuze [1994; 1977; 1973] 1997a: 183–92.
33. The three stages of schizoanalytic de-oedipalisation are punctuated by the

appearance of the third persona in the masochist assemblage.
34. Cf. Lacan [1963] 2006: 645–68.
35. Cf. Freud 1930: SE, XXI, 59–148.
36. Lagache proposes a split between the ego and the superego determining the
different structure of sadism and masochism (Deleuze 2006: 129–30; endnote
41). Some conclusions point to sadism representing an oedipal trajectory and
masochism a schizoanalytic trajectory while both psychic formations struggle
with the death instinct.
37. The sadist’s trajectory leads to a bloated superego that is so overwhelming that
there is nothing but the superego in an all-consuming void left by thanatos.
The sadist is his own superego and the victims function as externalised ego
replacements. Since the ego is annihilated in sadism, the superego has lost its
moral power of conscience. Deleuze terms this process in sadism as pseudo-
masochism which is yet another reversal of the Freudian hypothesis (Deleuze
2006: 124).
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Cicero’s De Fato in Deleuze’s Logic
of Sense
Michael James Bennett McMaster University
Abstract
The arguments of the Stoic Chrysippus recorded in Cicero’s De Fato
are of great importance to Deleuze’s conception of events in The Logic
of Sense. The purpose of this paper is to explicate these arguments,
to which Deleuze’s allusions are extremely terse, and to situate them
in the context of Deleuze’s broader project in that book. Drawing
on contemporary scholarship on the Stoics, I show the extent to
which Chrysippus’ views on compatibilism, hypothetical inference and
astrology support Deleuze’s claim that the Stoics developed a theory of
compatibilities and incompatibilities of events independent of corporeal
states of affairs.
Keywords: Deleuze, Stoicism, sense, event, incorporeals, Cicero, fate
Cicero’s De Fato is one of Deleuze’s principal sources for the theory

of incorporeal events offered in The Logic of Sense. Of particular
importance are Cicero’s reports about arguments attributed to the Stoic
scholiarch Chrysippus, whose relationship with Deleuze has recently
been the object of much critical interest (Beaulieu 2005, Sellars 2007,
Bowden 2011). And yet Deleuze’s arguments about the De Fato (near
the beginning of the twenty-fourth series of The Logic of Sense) are
compressed almost beyond recognition. Time and effort are required to
expand and elucidate them, to put them in their correct context, and to
defend them in the light of recent scholarship on the Stoics. The purpose
of this paper is to do this. In order to accomplish this task I will first say
something about Deleuze’s theory of sense–events, especially Deleuze’s
assimilation of Chrysippus to the transcendental logic of structuralism
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2015.0173
26 Michael James Bennett
in which paradox is the necessary genetic condition of sense. Once

the elucidation and defence of Deleuze’s claims about the De Fato has
been accomplished, it emerges that Deleuze takes the Stoic fatalism
presented in Cicero’s text to provide the conceptual resources for
affirming disjunctive syntheses as such, insofar as Stoic fatalism insists
on the priority of pre-conceptual and non-corporeal incompatibilities
among events. Deleuze thinks that a traditional Kantian transcendental
logic lacks these resources, since it makes sense determinate to a pre-
existent normalised framework of possibility.
I. Context: Stoic Causality

The Stoics champion a novel ontological stemma, in which different
classifications of entities are sorted into a branching hierarchy. The
most provocative feature of the Stoic system, and of greatest interest
to Deleuze, is the way the highest ontological genus, ‘something’ (to ti),
branches into both existent and non-existent species. It is a venerable
old view in Stoic scholarship that Zeno of Citium, founder of the
Stoa, originally supposed his corporealist thesis – the thesis that whatever
exists is a material body – to be compatible with saying, like Plato, that
being (to on) was the supreme genus. According to this view, it was
only under pressure from considerations about void, time, space and
meaningful language that the Stoic ontological picture needed to be
emended to accommodate incorporeal somethings (Caston 1999: 151,
n.10), which are said to ‘subsist’ (huphistasthai), rather than exist in
the full-blooded sense (Diogenes Laertius 1925: 7. 63; Sextus Empiricus
1842a: 8. 70). In other words, in order to accept the equation of
bodies (sômata) with existents (onta), without totally eliminating time,
meaning, etc. from ontology, Zeno eventually found he also had to
‘reject the Platonic identification of being with being something’ (Caston
1999: 151). The Stoics held that not everything that is something
necessarily exists. Zeno’s reformed Platonism thus entails duplicity
about the predicate ‘being’. Accordingly, Plutarch testifies, almost in
the same breath, that for the Stoics ‘only bodies are’ (onta gar mona
ta sômata) and that ‘some things are that are not’ (einai men ouk’onta
d’einai; Plutarch 1976a: 1073d–e). Victor Caston has suggested that for
the Stoics to talk about something as ‘a being’ (on) is to self-consciously
mark its ontological status. Caston renders the marked sense ‘to exist’,
and reserves the unmarked ‘to be’ for the subsistence of incorporeals, as
well as other uses (like the copula and the particular quantifier ‘there is’),
a usage which I follow (Caston 1999: 151–2).
Cicero’s De Fato in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense 27
According to the mainstream interpretations of Stoic ontology,

incorporeals are ontologically dependent on bodies:
in Stoic usage the Greek language equivalent to our ‘subsist’ [huphistasthai]

clearly signifies what may be called a subordinate or rather dependent mode
of existence, one that is distinct from being real in the sense of being tangible
and thus capable of acting and being acted upon. (Graeser 1978: 89; compare
Long 1971: 90)
More recently, Caston has proposed that we should say the Stoics
make incorporeals ‘supervene’ on corporeal states in a way that
anticipates contemporary discussions in analytic metaphysics and the
philosophy of mind. For example, as Caston renders it, Chrysippus
is reported to have said that ‘sayables [lekta] . . . are supervenient on
thought (paruphistamenon tê dianoia)’ (Sextus Empiricus 1842a: 8. 12;
Caston 1999: 207, n.126). The Stoic terminology is consistent between
Diogenes and Sextus; ‘paruphistamenon’ is grammatically related to
‘huphistasthai’. While Caston doubts that Stoic ‘paruphestatai’ means
the mere parasitism of incorporeals on bodies, he suggests that the ‘Stoic
usage of the term may not require anything stronger than the covariation
involved in supervenience’ (Caston 1999: 207, n.126). Either way,
the relation between incorporeals and bodies remains an asymmetrical
dependency. Incorporeals follow bodies and not the other way around.
There is one notable minor exception to the dominant view that
incorporeality depends on corporeality. Marcelo Boeri (2001) argues
that the asymmetrical dependency of incorporeals on corporeals is
‘not consistent with Stoic philosophy as a whole’ (Boeri 2001: 727).
Rather, we should recognise a ‘reciprocal dependence’ between bodies
and incorporeals (728). Boeri suggests, for example, that the Stoics
understood the incorporeal time not as dependent upon relations among
bodies but as the ‘necessary condition’ for the interactions among
bodies to take place (729).1 Lekta likewise, Boeri thinks, exercise a
reciprocal influence upon bodies: ‘Sayables also play a crucial role in
the constitution of the real and corporeal world, for one of their basic
functions consists in establishing the logical-linguistic relations which
permit us to categorise the object, so that we can know it’ (732).
Deleuze’s reading of Stoicism will be of interest to Stoic scholars like
Boeri to the extent that he provides a reconstruction of Stoicism in the
light of which Boeri’s interpretation is readily defensible. For Deleuze,
incorporeals (specifically, lekta) are not merely dependent, sterile by-
products of causal networks among existing bodies, but exercise a power
that Deleuze calls ‘quasi-causal’ (Deleuze 1990: 94).2
The Stoics understand causality in terms of the ontological divergence

of bodies and incorporeals:
Zeno says that a cause is a ‘that because of which’, while that of which it
is the cause is an actualized predicate [sumbebêkos]; and that the cause is a
body [sôma], while that of which it is a cause is a predicate [kategorêma] . . .
Chrysippus says that a cause is ‘that because of which’; and that the cause
is an existent and a body < while that of which is it is a cause is neither an
existent nor a body > . (Stobaeus, Eclogae 1. 138, 14–139, 4, qtd in Long and
Sedley 1987: 333, translation modified)
The Stoics define causes as bodies: anything that acts or can be acted
upon must exist and be corporeal. But they also speak of something else,
‘that of which a cause is a cause’, which is an incorporeal predicate:
The Stoics say that every cause is a body which becomes the cause to a body of
something incorporeal. For instance, the scalpel, a body, becomes the cause to
the flesh, a body, of the incorporeal predicate ‘being-cut’. (Sextus Empiricus
1842a: 9. 211; Long and Sedley 1987: 333)
Michael Frede explains that the question facing the Stoics was whether
or not causes are items like explanations, linguistic statements or facts,
what he calls ‘propositional items’ (1980: 221–3). On the basis of their
corporealist thesis, the Stoics reject the prevailing view (with its roots in
Plato and Aristotle) that explanatory propositional items count as causes
in the full sense (223). For the Stoics, if causes are to exist then they must
be bodies. Explanations have no direct causal power. Causes are bodies
and what causes cause are effects, specifically understood as predicates
becoming true of bodies.
II. Deleuze’s Paradoxical Sense–Events

Deleuze is aware of the peculiarity of Stoic causal theory: ‘effects are
not bodies, but, properly speaking, “incorporeal” entities. They are
not physical qualities and properties, but rather logical and dialectical
attributes. They are not things or facts, but events’ (Deleuze 1990: 4–5).
But he quickly diverges from the standard account of Stoic causality
by speaking of the ‘quasi-causality’ among events–effects themselves:
‘Incorporeal effects are never themselves causes in relation to each
other; rather, they are only “quasi-causes” following laws which perhaps
express in each case the relative unity or mixture of bodies on which
they depend for their real causes’ (6). Deleuze’s interpretation of the
quasi-causal relations among incorporeals derives in large measure from
Cicero’s De Fato, and the discussion of Chrysippus’ theory of co-fated
events (confatalia). Deleuze takes from Cicero the idea that effects
have relations of compatibility and incompatibility among themselves,
relatively independent of the corporeal activities of causes. We want to
see how Deleuze defends this view. Deleuze asserts that a full account of
the Stoic event involves explaining a double causality: ‘The Stoics saw
clearly that the event is subject to a double causality, referring on the
one hand to mixtures of bodies which are its cause and, on the other, to
other events which are its quasi-cause’ (94).
The equation of incorporeal lekta with events, and the emphasis
on the quasi-causality of lekta, are the two key facets of Deleuze’s
interpretation of Stoicism. In order to understand Deleuze’s conception
of the relative independence of effects/events we have to explain a bit
more about his thinking about sense. Deleuze explains that the nature of
quasi-causality has to be understood in terms of sense as well as paradox:
We have tried to ground this second causality [quasi-causality] in a way which
would conform to the incorporeal character of the surface and the event. It
seemed to us that the event, that is, sense, referred to a paradoxical element,
intervening as nonsense or as an aleatory point, and operating as a quasi-
cause assuring the full autonomy of the effect. (Deleuze 1990: 95)
How should we construe this emphatic statement? First of all, why

does Deleuze treat the Stoic theory of events and causality in terms of
sense? This is no idiosyncratic treatment. It is commonly claimed that
the Stoic semantic theory of lekta anticipated Gottlob Frege’s distinction
between the sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung) of a proposition. On
this reading, lekta do not refer to specific situations (configurations of
bodies or states of affairs), but rather enter into relationships among one
another. ‘Sense’ is the name for these relationships among lekta. Deleuze
was probably aware of this line of reasoning.3
An old controversy between readers of the Stoics illustrates the
operative sense–reference distinction. The Stoics distinguished between
‘complete’ and ‘deficient’ lekta:
Deficient [ellipê] are those which are unfinished in their expression, such as
writes; for we go on to ask ‘Who?’ Complete [autotelê] are those which
are finished in their expression, such as Socrates writes. So predicates
[katêgorêmata] are placed among the incomplete lekta, and propositions
[axiômata] and syllogisms and questions and enquiries are placed among the
complete. (Diogenes Laertius 1925: 7. 63)
A. A. Long proposes that the difference between a complete and

a deficient lekton is that the former refers to an existent situation
and the latter does not (Long 1971: 78). Other Stoic texts attest
that a proposition becomes true when it ‘obtains’ or ‘is actualised’

(huparchei).4 On Long’s reading, whether or not a proposition like
‘Peter is walking’ obtains should depend on whether or not Peter’s
body is actually walking. But it is not obvious that this is the best
construal of huparchein. For the Stoics, a proposition, which is a
complete lekton, takes a truth-value, and Diogenes Laertius explains it
is called ‘axiôma’ because it can be accepted (axioun) as true (Diogenes
Laertius 1925: 7. 65). A true proposition is an ‘acceptable’ one, and a
false proposition, unacceptable. There is no reference to any existent
state in this understanding of truth. A proposition is more or less
acclaimed as true. And so, Andreas Graeser criticises Long, arguing that
Long’s interpretation is out of keeping with the Stoics’ ‘fundamentally
nonreferential’ theory of meaning (Graeser 1978: 87).
The simplest way of understanding how a nonreferential theory of
meaning works is to think in terms of the ‘obtaining’ of propositions and
predicates. The Stoics thought that for every predicate (katagorêma) that
obtains there corresponds at least one proposition (axiôma) that obtains
(Bobzien 1998: 25–6). Typically, when one predicate obtains, a whole
menagerie of senses of that predicate also obtain simultaneously, as
various correspondent propositions. For example, when the proposition
‘Peter (a cat) is walking’ obtains – that is, when the predicate ‘is walking’
obtains – so also are the (true) propositions ‘an orange cat is walking’, ‘a
former stray is walking’, etc. It may be that the ‘obtaining’ of predicates
and propositions just is this relation among themselves, rather than a
reference to an actual corporeal state. Readers of the Stoics have often
noted that this ‘nonreferential’ theory of meaning looks to have a form
similar to Frege’s famous example of the sense of names in ‘On Sense and
Reference’. For instance, Frege claims that ‘morning star’ and ‘evening
star’ express different senses of the same referent (the planet Venus).
Regarding the name ‘Aristotle’, similarly, Frege accepts as equivalent
the propositions ‘the teacher of Alexander was born in Stagira’ and ‘the
pupil of Plato was born in Stagira’, which differ only in terms of sense
(Frege 1993: 23, n.4).
It is also common to pick out the Stoic distinction between sense and
reference with reference to another Austrian philosopher: not Frege but
Alexius Meinong. Caston, for example, compares the Stoic ‘marked’
and ‘unmarked’ senses of ‘to be’ with Meinong’s subsistence/existence
(bestehen/existieren) distinction (Caston 1999: 152–54), as do Long and
Sedley in their influential sourcebook (1987: 164). Meinong’s theory of
the ‘Außersein’ of the pure object is well equipped to accommodate the
way that sense, and not reference, is fundamental to the Stoic theory
of meaning.5 Deleuze also associates Meinong and the Stoics (Deleuze

1990: 19–20). When he discusses the Stoic theory of incorporeal lekta in
terms of sense, it is because of these well-established parallels with the
modern philosophers of language Frege and Meinong.
Deleuze’s discussion of the Stoic theory of events in terms of
paradox is more idiosyncratic. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze claims
that the ‘series’ that he extracts from Stoicism (the series of bodies
and incorporeals, on the one hand, and the corresponding series of
denotation and sense, on the other) are characterised by internal
disequilibria that relate them to one another. In each series, there
are ‘floating’ elements, outliers that belong to the series yet somehow
fail to be assimilated to it, which Deleuze calls ‘paradoxical’ elements
or ‘aleatory points’. Deleuze claims that a ‘structure’ has two main
characteristics: first, it is composed of at least two series related to one
another in an asymmetrical way suggesting dependency (for example,
one series is ‘signifying’ and the other ‘signified’), and second, the
series in question are freed from their determinate dependency to
the extent they contain floaters, elements lacking an opposite number
in the parallel series (Deleuze 1990: 50–1).6 Deleuze claims that the
paradoxical elements, the lacks and/or excesses in the series, are the
elements ‘by means of which the series communicate without losing their
difference’ (50). That is, these elements are ‘differenciators’ which permit
differences (between series) to be thought in terms of their difference
rather than in terms of a presupposed identity (51; compare Deleuze
1994: 119–20).
Fundamentally, Deleuze thinks, Stoic ontology evinces the discovery
of ‘structure’ understood in this way:
the discovery of sense as an incorporeal effect, being always produced by the
circulation of the element = x [i.e. the floater, or paradoxical element] in the
series of terms which it traverses, must be named the ‘Chrysippus effect’ . . .
Structuralism, whether consciously or not, celebrates new findings of a Stoic
. . . inspiration. (Deleuze 1990: 70–1)
Deleuze means here that the sense of a term (for example a name like
‘Aristotle’) is produced by a disjunction between two series, the series
of events or sense, and the series of beings or reference. There is no
one-to-one correspondence between reference and sense, and no reason
to think there should be one. Predicates belonging to the sense-series
(‘pupil of Plato’, ‘teacher of Alexander’) can vastly exceed the term in
the denotation-series to which they are supposedly parallel: Aristotle that
physical man. Construed this way, Deleuze’s claims would be basically at
home in Frege’s famous essay as well, since for Frege any given reference
can have a multitude of senses.7
Deleuze claims that that the relative independence of sense with
respect to relations among bodies has to do with the way sense borrows
the productive or genetic power of the paradoxical element: ‘as soon
as sense is grasped, in its relation to the quasi-cause which produces
and distributes it at the surface, it inherits, participates in, and even
envelops and possesses the force of this ideational cause [sc. the quasi-
cause]’ (Deleuze 1990: 95). Sense acts as a quasi-cause when it borrows
this force. Sense is ‘quasi-causal’ because it is paradoxical. The operative
paradox here is what Deleuze calls ‘Frege’s paradox’ (29), the indefinite
proliferation of senses of a referent, and also names for those senses.
Once we understand the character of structure, Deleuze thinks, then
we can understand the reciprocal production of sense and the other
characteristic relations of the proposition: denotation, manifestation and
signification (12–14; compare Voss 2013: 19–20). Deleuze argues that
reconciling these two aspects of sense (its being produced as a mere effect
of bodily causes and its ‘genetic power’) requires moving from a formal
logic to a ‘transcendental logic’, which would be the titular ‘logic of
sense’ (Deleuze 1990: 95–6).
By transcendental logic Deleuze means a logic that seeks the
necessary conditions of a given phenomenon. The phenomenon of which
Deleuze thinks the Stoics articulate the transcendental condition is real
experience. That is to say that the transcendental logic Deleuze discovers
in the Stoics and structuralism is distinct from Kantian transcendental
logic. Deleuze contrasts what he calls ‘real experience’ with the ‘possible
experience’ to which Kantian transcendental arguments accommodate
everything (Deleuze 1994: 154). The problem with Kant, Deleuze
thinks, is that seeking out the conditions of possible experience pre-
emptively judges experience in terms of a presupposed form of possibility
itself. In short, Kant presupposes a reason to think there should be
correspondence between series. Deleuze says this in a couple of ways:
Kant thinks of the transcendent condition ‘in the image of’ what it
conditions (Deleuze 1990: 105), and Kant’s conditioning is merely
‘extrinsic’ (Deleuze 1990: 97; Deleuze 1994: 180) since it applies an
‘external’, pre-given metric to experience. Just as, in Difference and
Repetition, Deleuze criticises Kant for subordinating his account of
human experience to the ‘hypothetical form of possible experience’
(196), in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze criticises whoever remains satisfied
by the closed circle of denotation and signification for investigating
no farther than the, so to speak, hypothetical form of possible truth.
Deleuze’s challenge is to investigate the real conditions of experience,

and, in The Logic of Sense, this means investigating what lies outside
the closed denotative–significant loop, the great Stoic discovery (Deleuze
1990: 19).
Deleuze says that signification, the relation of a term to universal
or general concepts, often seeks only the hypothetical form of possible
truth (1990: 14). Moreover, it ‘does not establish the truth without also
establishing the possibility of error. For this reason, the condition of
truth is not opposed to the false, but to the absurd’ (14–15). That is,
while a true denotation can be opposed to a false one, a signification
that properly specifies the conditions of truth should not be opposed
to a signification specifying the conditions of the false, but rather
to an absurd signification, or to a signification that doesn’t specify
conditions in a sensible way. The ‘absurd’ transcendental condition
is the one that interests Deleuze. What is ‘absurd’ from the point of
view of denotation–signification is precisely sense. Sense lies outside the
closed loop of the other dimensions of the proposition. It can relate
propositions in a way distinct from conceptual entailment: nothing
in ‘student of Plato’ conceptually implies ‘teacher of Alexander’. The
(true) relationship between these two senses is basically an accident of
history. ‘Absurdity’ for Deleuze is the relationship between the closed
denotation–signification loop and its outside.
To the extent that the role of sense (of incorporeal lekta) is not
substantive in a Platonic way – meaning that lekta, for the Stoics, do not
explain the relations among existing bodies by being already existent
themselves (Caston 1999: 212) – Deleuze thinks that Stoic lekta can
help to explain the conditions of real experience. The key difference
between real and possible experience lies in the way that rising from
the possible to its condition presupposes that the condition is already
existent, whereas the real arises from the unconditioned, which is to say,
a non-existent condition:
[In denotation or signification] one is perpetually referred from the

conditioned to the condition, and also from the condition to the conditioned.
For the condition of truth to avoid this defect, it ought to have an element of
its own, distinct from the form of the conditioned. It ought to have something
unconditioned capable of assuring a real genesis of denotation and of the
other dimensions of the proposition. (Deleuze 1990: 19)
For Deleuze, the fact that the Stoics locate truth in sense-relations
between subsistent lekta devoid of existence provides truth with such an
‘element of its own’ (namely sense). Deleuze seems to suggest that the
unconditioned element of truth really generates the other dimensions of

the proposition. That is, far from being merely dependent on denotation,
which is itself in turn totally dependent on the existence of bodies, lekta
are not only independent but possess a genetic power in relation to the
other dimensions to which attempts have been made to reduce them.
Deleuze thinks this is a basically Stoic discovery because the Stoics held
fast to the doctrine that lekta are not existent.
Not only is Deleuze’s reading of the Stoics bound up with his broader
ambition in The Logic of Sense, but its purpose is to articulate the
conditions of real experience in contrast to the Kantian paradigm. For
this reason it’s important to understand Deleuze’s particular arguments
about the Stoics, especially Cicero’s reports about Chrysippus in De
Fato, because they deal explicitly with the productive relation between
events and states of affairs or sense and reference. Studying Cicero can
help us better understand the way Deleuze works through the apparent
contradiction that events are the effects of bodily causes and that they
exercise on bodies a quasi-causal power. The remainder of this paper
will be devoted to reconstructing what Deleuze calls quasi-causality, the
relations among sense–events independent of reference to actual states
of affairs.
III. Fate
For the productive relations between sense–events and states of affairs,
the Stoics adopt the technical term ‘fate’. It is helpful to understand
Deleuze’s claims about the relative autonomy of the series of events by
comparing them with the reconstructions of Stoic causal theory from
other contemporary commentators. Suzanne Bobzien’s (1998) study
of Stoic determinism hints that the Stoics could have recognised that
incorporeals play a quasi-causal role, specifically in helping to determine
what events occur ‘by fate’. Bobzien maintains that for the Stoics there
are two main types of interaction between bodies: change or motion
(kinêsis), on the one hand, and sustenance (skhesis), on the other.
Chrysippus reportedly said that ‘none of the parts [of the universe] can
be moved or sustained [kinêsthêsetai ê skhêsei] otherwise than according
to its common nature’ (Plutarch 1976b: 1050d). The common nature
of the universe, Plutarch sarcastically explains, includes for the Stoics
sustained conditions (skheseis) like ‘vices, diseases, greed, hedonism
[etc.]’, as well as motions (kinêseis) like ‘adulteries, thefts, betrayals,
[and] homicides’, all of which he implies are consistent with Stoic
divine providence. The point to emphasise here, though, is that since
there are two kinds of bodily interactions at work, there are two types
of cause: causes producing change, and causes sustaining qualitative
states. Bobzien perspicaciously notes that in the Stoic causal schema,
kinêseis and skheseis are therefore incorporeal effects of bodily causes
(Bobzien 1998: 22). This also means, Bobzien argues, that motions
and sustained conditions are events (gignomena), and she underscores
how with Plutarch and Cicero the terms ‘motions’, ‘conditions’ and
‘events’ are used almost interchangeably (26).8 Nevertheless, Bobzien
doubts that gignomenon is a well-defined technical term (26). Despite
Bobzien’s unwillingness to say that the Stoics have a well-articulated
theory of events, her work suggests the rudiments of such a theory and
locates its clearest expression exactly where Deleuze does, in Cicero’s
De Fato.
Bobzien claims that in discussing the Stoic theory of events she
merely restates the ancient ‘vagueness’ about gignomena by ‘using non-
committal words like “thing”, without trying to clear up the Stoic
mess’ (Bobzien 1998: 27). Using the vague term ‘thing’ is a reference
to Chrysippus’ response to the so-called ‘lazy argument’ (argos logos),
recorded by Cicero. The lazy argument offers an objection to the
hypothesis that everything occurs according to fate and runs roughly
thus:
[1] If it is fated that you will recover from an illness, whether or not
you consult a doctor, you will recover.
[2] If it is fated that you will not recover from an illness, whether or not
you consult a doctor, you will not recover.
[3] In any case, it is pointless to consult a doctor. (Cicero 1942: 28–9)
Cicero recounts that Chrysippus responded to this argument by

introducing a distinction between ‘res simplices’ and ‘res copulatae’,
simple and conjoined ‘things’. Whoever is convinced by the lazy
argument erroneously conflates the latter with the former (30). Events,
like recovering from an illness, are not fated in isolation. The event of
recovering may be conditioned by another event, such as consulting
a doctor. Although the term ‘res’ is ambiguous here, and ‘what
the corresponding Greek term was (if any) is uncertain’ (Bobzien
1998: 199–200), it is plausible to think that res may have rendered
gignomenon. Long and Sedley, for instance, accept that Chrysippus’
‘things’ are events (1987: 343). Chrysippus provides two examples of
res copulatae or conjoined events. First, ‘Laius will have a son Oedipus’
and ‘Laius will mate with a woman’ are conjoined because the fatedness
of the former requires or implies the fatedness of the latter. For the first
to be fated, the second must also be fated. Similarly, the event ‘Milo
will wrestle at Olympia’ is co-fated with ‘Someone will wrestle Milo at
Olympia’, since wrestling at Olympia is not something Milo can do by
himself. Events that are connected in this way are called ‘confatalia’,
co-fated things (Cicero 1942: 30).
But fate, for the Stoics, seems like an affair of bodies or causes only,
not events or effects. Chrysippus defines fate (heimarmenê) as a ‘chain
of causes’ (heirmos aitiôn or, in Latin, series causarum).9 We should
not project onto this image a modern conception of causality: the Stoic
causal chain is not a ‘sequence of events, each of which is cause to its
successor and effect of its predecessor’ (Meyer 2009: 73). Stoic effects
are not bodies, and so events cannot act directly as causes. Rather the
Stoic ‘chain of causes’ refers to a ‘cosmic sympathy . . . a complex set of
relations of causal influence between the various bodies of the cosmos’
(73). Causes ‘chained’ together are various quanta of the divine physical
body (pneuma) mixed in existing individuals. The ‘chain of causes’ is
‘Fate, qua pneuma in all things’ (Bobzien 1998: 50). In this causal chain,
there is nothing incorporeal, it seems.
Bobzien, however, reconstructs Stoic causal chaining in a way that
involves incorporeal effects. She wants to say that effects, in a manner
of speaking, exert influence on, or are causally relevant for, the activity
of future causes. She begins by suggesting that ‘any body that is (and
insofar as it is) a cause in the chain or partial network that leads up to
a later effect may be said to be (at least partially) causally responsible
for that motion’ (Bobzien 1998: 51). Her idea is that ‘three-place’ Stoic
causal relations can be serially chained thus:
Body [1] → Body [2] → Effect [1]
Body [2] → Body [3] → Effect [2]
A first body, say a scalpel, is a cause to a second body, some flesh, of

an effect, ‘being cut’. In turn that second body, some flesh, is a cause
to a third body, say a person’s soul, of a second effect, ‘being in pain’.
Bobzien thinks it is possible for a Stoic to say that Body [1] is (partially)
causally responsible for Effect [2], that the scalpel is partially responsible
for the soul being in pain. Bobzien’s reconstruction hinges on how she
understands the second three-place causal relation as a result of the first
one. If it is a result, she must say something new about Effect [1]: ‘An
effect . . . in a causal chain that “makes” (or contributes to making) the
body at which it occurs become in turn a cause of a further effect . . .
must be called a causal occurrent of [that further effect]’ (Bobzien 1998:
51). In our example, ‘being cut’ is a ‘causal occurrent’ of the further
effect of ‘being in pain’.10 Being a ‘causal occurrent’ in this sense is

like an event or effect being ‘quasi-causal’. An effect, while not acting
on bodies like a cause, makes a body to be a cause of some further
effect.
Despite her wariness about the vagueness inherent in the Stoic theory
of the relations between events, Bobzien deploys causal occurrents
throughout her account of the Stoic theory of divination (167, 175–9).
Specifically, Bobzien understands Chrysippean confatalia as a doctrine
about causal occurrents. As she puts it, confatalia introduce ‘causally
relevant necessary conditions’ for any given event, which are themselves
events:
A consequence of the existence of such necessary conditions of occurrents
for Chrysippus’ determinism is that [events] are not fated in isolation. For
they introduce a restriction on the possible combination of [events] that can
obtain in the course of the world, and hence – because everything is fated – on
the combination of [events] that can be fated. (Bobzien 1998: 224)11
One way of understanding Deleuze’s emphasis on quasi-causality is

as an inquiry concerning the nature of the restrictions imposed by
Stoic confatalia. Deleuze’s meditation on Stoic fatalism concludes that
the Stoic doctrine of confatalia contains a theory of the compatibility
and incompatibility of events, crucially independent of straightforward
corporeal causality:
Destiny [Fate] is primarily the unity and the link of physical [i.e. corporeal]
causes among themselves. Incorporeal effects are obviously subject to destiny,
to the extent that they are the effect of these causes. But to the extent
they differ in nature from these causes, they enter, with one another, into
relations of quasi-causality . . . Between events, there seem to be formed
extrinsic relations of silent compatibility and incompatibility, of conjunction
and disjunction, which are very difficult to apprehend. What makes an event
compatible or incompatible with another? We cannot appeal to causality.
(Deleuze 1990: 169–70)
The contribution of ‘causal occurrents’ to the Stoic conception of

Fate is precisely what Deleuze is interested in. By invoking the
silent compatibilities and incompatibilies between events themselves,
Chrysippus shows that the lazy argument fails because it assumes that no
events are co-fated. In fact, Chrysippus says, it may indeed be the case
that getting better requires and implies going to the doctor. But, as is
typical with Stoic paralogisms, the conclusion to the lazy argument does
contain a grain of truth; convalescing and visiting the doctor may be
co-fated, but from the point of view of fate the relation between the
two events is quasi-causal, not causal. Going to the doctor does not
cause you to get better.
As we shall see in detail, Deleuze seeks to draw out in Stoic fatalism
is the way in which the silent compatibilities among events depend
on the aleatory power that events borrow from paradox. Non-causal
compatibilities and incompatibilities are the ‘communications’ among
events effected to the extent that events borrow the power of structural
floaters or paradoxical elements (Deleuze 1990: 50).
IV. Deleuze and Cicero’s De Fato

The question for the remainder of the paper is how to characterise quasi-
causality or the relations of compatibility and incompatibility among
events themselves. A good way to start answering is in terms of Deleuze’s
analyses of Cicero’s De Fato. Deleuze makes three major claims about
the De Fato, his principal source for the Stoic doctrine of quasi-causality,
in quick succession. All three deserve to be fleshed out. First, Deleuze
avows that the independence or ‘autonomy’ of the quasi-causal series
of lekta, with respect to properly causal bodies, is the outcome of
Chrysippus’ compatibilism in the ancient debate on determinism: the
simultaneous affirmation of fate and denial of necessity (Deleuze 1990:
169). Second, Deleuze remarks that Chrysippus’ infamous rebuke to
the Chaldean astrologers, that they need to rephrase their prophetic
hypotheticals (Cicero 1942: 15), proves that Chrysippus is aware of
the fact that the quasi-causal incompatibility of two events is distinct
from (and prior to) logical contradiction, which remains a relationship
between propositions and concepts in the dimension of signification
(Deleuze 1990: 170). Third, Deleuze claims that for the Stoics astrology
provides a well-defined theory of the criteria for the convergence and
divergence of events (Deleuze 1990: 171). I will deal with each of these
claims in order.
Deleuze’s First Claim: Chrysippean Compatibilism Means the

Distinction between Corporeal Causality and Evental
Quasi-Causality
The Stoics say that everything occurs according to fate (Diogenes
Laertius 1925: 7. 149; Cicero 1942: 20–1). Both Bobzien and Deleuze
accept that, although fate is a chain of causes (in other words, bodies),
the things that happen ‘according to fate’ are incorporeal events. Deleuze
suggests that the relative independence of events from the properly
causal series should be understood in terms of Chrysippus’ much-

discussed acceptance of fate and denial of necessity (Deleuze 1990: 6,
169). Appreciating Deleuze’s point requires supplementing his allusion
with material from the De Fato about how Chrysippus’ account of
fate is distinct from Diodorean necessitarianism, and about the kind of
causality involved when events happen ‘by fate’. Contemporary readers
of the Stoics are abundantly helpful here.
Cicero reports that for Chrysippus three conditions mutually imply
one another: (1) that everything occurs by means of fate, (2) that
every proposition (enuntiatio) is either true or false, or in other words
that the principle of bivalence obtains for all propositions, and (3)
that everything takes place by means of ‘antecedent causes’ (causae
antegressae or causae antecedentes).12 I will discuss the second and then
the third. Chrysippus thought that ‘if there were an event without a
cause, then it would not be the case that every proposition is either true
or false’ (Cicero 1942: 20; Bobzien 1998: 61). The required connections
between antecedent causes, fate and the principle of bivalence suggest to
Bobzien that the Stoics accept a kind of ‘logical determinism’ that ‘argues
from the truth of propositions to the necessity of events’, a live option in
antiquity that is much maligned today: ‘Nowadays, logical determinism
is usually considered as based on a fallacy, confounding logical relations
between propositions with physical connections between objects or
events’ (Bobzien 1998: 59).
It is not correct to see in the contemporary rejection of logical
determinism a rejection of the Stoics’ real position. Since Chrysippus
largely accepts Zeno’s revised ontological stemma, which accommodates
existent as well as non-existent somethings, Chrysippus’ position with
respect to determinism is more nuanced. With Chrysippus, there is no
question of any physical connections between events that have been
confused for logical ones. The Stoics identify events with propositions,
insofar as they are both incorporeal lekta under different descriptions.
Nor is there any question of the necessity that Chrysippus rejects being
identified with logical determination. Chrysippus’ position in Cicero’s
De Fato suggests that what we understand as ‘logical necessity’ (for
instance, the necessity that a true conclusion follows from true premises)
should be identified with the correspondences among events that occur
according to fate. So it’s not the case that Chrysippus argues from the
truth of propositions to the necessity of events. Events are not necessary,
although they are ‘fated’. The truth of incorporeal propositions, for
Chrysippus, lies in their ‘logical’ convergences, rather than in their real
or implied reference to actually existing beings. In sum, Chrysippus
identifies necessity with relations among bodies, and (what we call)

logical ‘necessity’ with fate.
In ancient discussions of what Bobzien calls ‘fate-determinism’, like
Cicero’s De Fato, the main controversy concerns what could possibly be
decisive or ‘genetic’ about relations among propositions. This question
has to do specifically with whether propositions about future events (for
example, the future contingents discussed by Aristotle, and the putatively
necessary propositions about the future in Diodorus’ Master Argument)
somehow transmit necessity to actually existing things in the present.13
It should already be obvious, given the division of ‘somethings’ into
existent and non-existent series, that since relations among incorporeal
propositions cannot interact directly with bodies in a causal way, for
the Stoics propositions (about the future or anything else) can’t make
bodies do anything. Chrysippus’ distinction between fate and necessity
is a corollary of the basic Stoic ontological gesture. When the Stoics
discuss what happens according to fate, they mean the coherency among
incorporeal events expressed in propositions and not mean relations
between bodies.
Chrysippus has a hard time articulating this point in a largely hostile
context. Most of the hostility toward Stoic fatalism is framed in terms
of the fear that fate threatens the idea of moral responsibility (Sedley
1977: 96). Defenders of Stoicism tend to represent Chrysippus as a
compatibilist, carving out a niche for moral responsibility despite the
fatality of the cosmos (Stough 1978; Frede 2003). The most bald-faced
statement of ancient necessitarianism is usually attributed to Diodorus
Cronus who is positioned as Chrysippus’ theoretical adversary in the
De Fato.
Diodorus defines modalities: the possible (to dunaton) as a
proposition that ‘either is or will be true’, the necessary (to anagkaion)
as ‘what being true will not be false’, and the impossible (to adunaton)
as ‘what being false will not be true’.14 The permutations of these
definitions in his so-called ‘Master Argument’ are often understood
as a proof of fatal necessity, or an explanation of how true propositions
about the future transmit necessity to the present.15 Diodorus argues:
1. Every true proposition about the past is necessary (that is, it will not
become false).
For example, the true proposition ‘These words were written in
Montréal’ will not become false for any reason. This premise looks
intuitively acceptable, for how could a true event in the past become
false? It would have to have not occurred, which is absurd.
2. An impossible proposition (that is, a false proposition that will not become
true) does not follow from a possible one (a proposition true at present or
at some time in the future).
Given how Diodorus has defined his modal terms, this premise appears
to be straightforwardly valid.
3. There is no possible proposition (or event) that is not true or will not be
true. This last point appears to imply that everything possible either is or
will be true.
Consider a possible proposition about the future: ‘this ship will arrive
safely in port.’ Diodorus thinks, if such a proposition is possible then it
will be true. And it is clearly a possibility. But what if the ship sinks?
Diodorus’ modal definitions make it difficult to conceive of how a true
proposition could become false, even a proposition about the future.
And so, true possible propositions stray dangerously close to necessary
ones – true propositions that will not become false.
Whether or not Diodorus was merely attempting a modest definition
of modal terms in relation to each other, without actually identifying
the actual, the possible, and the necessary (Sedley 1977: 99), Cicero
represents Diodorus in the De Fato as a strict necessitarian against whom
Chrysippus reacts (Cicero 1942: 13, 17).
Chrysippus specifically objects to the way Diodorean principles
require denying that ‘counterfactual possibilities’ (possibilities that are
not true now and might not be in the future) and ‘factual non-necessities’
(true present propositions that may become false in the future) can ever
obtain (Bobzien 1998: 106). Things that will not be true are not even
possible. Contingent propositions about the future, whose contradiction
is also possible, have no place in Diodorus’ modal world.
Chrysippus, in contrast, allows for possibilities of the kind Diodorus
refuses, and thus breaks with the perceived necessitarianism in Diodorus
(Cicero 1942: 13). Chrysippus affirms that ‘This jewel will be broken’
is a possible proposition about the future of a currently unbroken
jewel even if the jewel in question will not become broken. In order to
allow for such contingencies, Chrysippus supplements Diodorus’ modal
definitions: for Chrysippus the possible is what is ‘capable of being true,
where there is nothing hindering its being true’.16 The exact nature of
what ‘hinders’ propositions from being true is sometimes unclear. But
there is a report that the Stoics maintained it is possible for grain chaff
to burn in the open air, but impossible when the chaff is submerged
in water.17 It looks here like the external circumstances hindering
possibilities and impossibilities are instances of brute corporeal causality.
Chrysippean modality has been understood in this way: Sedley implies
that a jewel’s becoming broken would be Chrysippean-impossible if it

were prevented by corporeal circumstances from being broken, ‘encased
in concrete and guarded day and night’, and so on (1977: 99).
Chrysippus’ new definition of possibility, moreover, also creates space
for a kind of personal and moral agency in the ‘freedom from’ both
corporeal and conceptual necessitation. States (skheseis) such as ‘a vice’
and motions (kinêseis) such as ‘a vicious act’ remain possible, so long
as they are not externally impeded by corporeal circumstances, even if
they are never actualised. For Bobzien, and others, this is enough of a gap
between the series of bodies and the series of lekta for it to be meaningful
to say that humans enjoy a range of negatively free ‘purposeful action’
and can be called morally responsible (Bobzien 1998: 119).
Even though he does not accept Diodorean necessitarianism,
Chrysippus still maintains that ‘everything happens according to fate’
and that such fatalism is connected to the universal validity of dialectical
principles like the principle of bivalence. Perhaps we can understand
how Chrysippus’ fatalism differs from Diodorus’ necessitarianism by
investigating the third condition that Chrysippus thinks is mutually
implied by the other two: that everything has ‘antecedent causes’. What
are these antecedent causes?
The Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias criticises
the Stoics for producing a theoretical ‘swarm of causes’ (smênos
aitiôn).18 The creation of a vast array of different kinds of causes was
probably related to Stoic fatalism without necessity. Cicero reports that
Chrysippus ‘distinguishes different kinds of causes in order both to
escape necessity and to retain fate’ (1942: 41). In the words of Dorothea
Frede, Alexander of Aphrodisias ‘insinuat[es] that the Stoics tried to
obfuscate the embarrassing consequences of their determinist principles
by a set of bewildering distinctions’ (Frede 2003: 187). Michael Frede
has attempted to make some sense of the Stoics’ puzzling causal
terminology. He shows, on the one hand, that ‘the Stoic distinction
of various kinds of causes is a refinement on an ordinary intuitive
distinction of various kinds of responsibility’ (1980: 225), and on the
other hand, that to say that everything happens by fate is to say that
everything happens according to one specific kind of cause (234).
Cicero says that Chrysippus distinguishes between ‘causae perfectae
et principalis’ (perfect and principal causes) and ‘causae adiuvantes
et proximae’ (auxiliary and proximate causes) (Cicero 1942: 41).
Examining parallel Greek texts, Frede conjectures that ‘perfecta et
principalis’ is a translation of something like ‘autoteles kai sunektikon’
(Frede 1980: 237). That is, he thinks this kind of cause should be
identified with the ‘sunektikon’ cause of the coherence or tenor (hexis)
of bodies, identified by the Stoics with a portion of divine pneuma. The

second type of cause distinguished here (‘auxiliary and proximate’) is
harder to pin down. But Cicero quotes Chrysippus saying: ‘when we say
everything happens according to fate by antecedent causes, we do not
wish it to be understood by perfect and principal causes, but by auxiliary
antecedent and proximate causes [causis adiuvantibus antecedentibus et
proximis]’ (Cicero 1942: 41).
The idea that ‘everything happens by fate’ does not mean ‘everything
happens according to pneumatic corporeal causes’ has big consequences.
Frede thinks that all the terminological proliferation boils down to the
basic insight that responsibility for an event’s occurrence is often not
straightforwardly attributable (1980: 237). The ‘sunhektic’ cause, for the
Stoics, marks a limit case, a cause that ‘does not depend for its causal
efficacy on the agency of some other cause outside its control’ (239),
which is why the cause is also called ‘autotelês’, perfect or complete in
itself. Such conceptually neat causality is the exception rather than the
rule in the Stoic cosmos. Typically, different kinds of cause (auxiliary
causes, helping causes, ‘co-causes’, and so on) collaborate to produce
effects (Cicero 1949: 58). When Chrysippus says that the antecedent
causes constitutive of fate act like auxiliary and proximate causes, rather
than perfect causes, this means that the expression ‘everything happens
according to fate’ does not indicate that there is one perfect cause that
acts alone to produce all effects. Moreover, as Frede reads it, this is
the reason why ‘the antecedent cause and hence fate by themselves
do not necessitate the effect. For whether the antecedent cause does
bring about the effect depends on the activity of the perfect cause,
and whether the perfect cause does act is outside of the control of the
antecedent cause’ (1980: 239). Perfect or ‘sunhektic’ corporeal causes are
thus necessitating in the way that Chrysippus wants to distinguish from
fate.
Chrysippus’ famous argument about a rolling cylinder that follows
will be effective against anyone who thinks otherwise – that antecedent
causes are perfect and hence that fate necessitates. Chrysippus imagines
a cylinder rolling along a surface or a top spinning in place. Either
of these bodies ‘cannot begin to move without a push. But once that
has happened, [Chrysippus] thinks the cylinder rolls, and the spinning-
top spins, by its own nature [suapte natura]’ (Cicero 1942: 42). In this
thought experiment the initial push is a properly antecedent cause that
does not necessitate the motion of the cylinder, but cooperates with
the cylinder’s ‘inner nature’. Chrysippus thinks, then, that ‘fate’ acts
more like a fortuitous push than like an inner nature. If, from a Stoic
perspective, there were perfect causes acting in isolation (which is in
reality rare) then they would be genuinely necessitarian, conferring a

purely physical necessity.
Chrysippus apparently transferred this argument about responsibility
for the cylinder’s motion to the moral realm. In order to avoid the
dangerous idea that human actions are determined by external causes,
he likens the cylinder’s behaviour to what happens in human sense
perception. Just as a push moves a cylinder, similarly ‘an object perceived
will impress and as it were seal its appearance on the mind, but
assent will remain in our power [sed adsensio nostra erit in potestate]’
(Cicero 1942: 43). Chrysippus’ point is that while our actions do have
antecedent causes, namely sense impressions, it is wrong to say that these
causes necessitate our actions (Frede 1980: 235). It is more correct to say
that the perfect cause lies within us, in our proper nature or character,
and that this, if anything, has the force necessary to move us to action
(Inwood 1985: 69–70; Frede 2003: 192).
So Stoic responsibility resides in freedom from external physical
compulsions like sense impressions. Deleuze’s incredibly condensed
argument about Cicero’s De Fato indicates that the relation of relative
dependence and independence into which Chrysippus puts fate and
necessity (or antecedent and sunhektic causes) in that text is isomorphic
with (or perhaps identical to) the relative dependence and independence
of Stoic quasi-causes with respect to causes. Just as auxiliary causes
depend on perfect causes, but maintain a kind of independence (that
of the push with respect to the nature of the cylinder), so also quasi-
causes depend on causes, but likewise manifest their autonomy whenever
sense borrows the ‘genetic force’ of nonsense. I do not think Deleuze
does not want to make a specific point about free will and determinism
in Stoicism, but he does claim that the quasi-causal independence of
events is akin to the Chrysippean independence of fate with respect to
necessity, discussion of which he leaves latent. If we omit this parallel
with Chrysippus we lose an argument that is readily defensible in the
light of the scholarly consensus on Stoicism.
Deleuze’s Second Claim: Chrysippus’ Correction of the Chaldean

Astronomers Reveals His Awareness of the Difference between
Conceptual and Evental Incompatibility
We can turn now to Deleuze’s second major claim about the De Fato.
While his first claim is intended to distinguish the ‘silent relations’
among events (fate) from the causal relations among bodies (necessity),
the purpose of his second claim is to distinguish the relations among
events from the relations among concepts. Deleuze perceives that for the
Stoics the incompatibility among fated events is distinct from physical

incompatibility, on the one hand, and logical contradiction, on the other.
Deleuze makes this point in terms of Stoic hypothetical syllogisms. He
remarks that:
commentators are certainly right to recall that the question here [about the
significance of hypothetical inferences] is not about a relation of physical
consequence or of causality in the modern sense of the word. But they are
perhaps wrong to see in [Stoic theories about the connections between events]
a simple logical consequence in the form of identity. (Deleuze 1990: 69)
Sean Bowden (2011: 34–5) has traced Deleuze’s unacknowledged

sources for the Stoic theory of connections among events that he
endorses to Diogenes Laertius (1925: 7. 71–5) and Sextus Empiricus
(1842b: 2. 110–13). In these passages the Stoics take conditionals to
be the typical form of relation between propositions:
For example, ‘If it is day, it is light’. This is true, since ‘Not: it is light’, the
contrary of the consequent, conflicts with ‘it is day’. A false conditional is
one the contrary of whose consequent does not conflict with its antecedent.
For example, ‘If it is day, Dion is walking’. For ‘Not: Dion is walking’ does
not conflict with ‘It is day’. (Diogenes Laertius 1925: 7. 73; Long and Sedley
1987: 208)
Deleuze is interested in what the verb ‘conflict’ (maxetai) is doing

here, and in the noun ‘cohesion’ or ‘connectedness’ (sunartêsis) in the
parallel passage in Sextus Empiricus (1842b: 2. 111), terms whose
interpretation is not agreed upon by commentators (Bobzien 1998: 159).
Deleuze thinks that the ‘conflict’ or ‘cohesion’ between antecedent and
consequent in Stoic hypotheticals is fully conceptual. He notes that for
the exemplary conditionals ‘If it is day, it is light’ and ‘If someone has
given birth, then she has milk’:
we can consider ‘being day’ or ‘having given birth’ as signifying properties
of a higher type than those over which they preside ‘being light’, ‘having
milk’. The link between propositions cannot be reduced either to an analytic
identity or to an empirical synthesis; rather it belongs to the domain of
signification – so that contradiction may be engendered, not in the relation
of a term to its opposite, but in relation of a term to the other term. (Deleuze
1990: 69)
In sum, putting propositions into relations in the form of hypothetical

propositions reveals compatibilities and incompatibilities in terms of sig-
nification, the relation of the propositions to general concepts (Deleuze
1990: 14).19 For Deleuze, compatibilities of this kind are ultimately
unsatisfactory, since they provide the condition of possible (but not
necessarily real) truth. Rather, Deleuze is interested in compatibilities

and incompatibilities between propositions in what he calls a structure,
where a nonsensical or paradoxical element connects events in a manner
‘entirely different’ from signification (Deleuze 1990: 69).
Deleuze’s interpretation of Stoic conditionals invites an instructive
contrast with Caston’s interpretation of Chrysippus. Caston thinks
Chrysippus rejects Zeno’s vision of concepts as generic intentional
objects (already a step away from Plato’s causal, substantial Forms).
Chrysippus is an ‘eliminativist about all generic entities’ and would
rather treat conceptuality in terms of ‘conventions involving names’
than in terms of generic objects (Caston 1999: 196). In order to avoid
hypostasising dubious generic entities, Chrysippus advocates changing
how we talk about concepts. He advocates analysing our ordinary
ways of speaking about conceptual entities and using a ‘logically
hygienic paraphrase that shows its commitments perspicuously’ (204).
Typically, Chrysippus’ hygienic paraphrases transform definitions into
conditionals: for instance, ‘man is a rational animal’ becomes ‘if
something is a man, then it is a rational animal’ (Sextus Empiricus
1842a: 11. 8–11). Rather than indicating that some generic entity ‘man’
exists, such hypotheticals are ontologically committed to particulars
only. Yet they still do the work of concepts, permitting relationships
of conformity and nonconformity, contradiction and non-contradiction,
among propositions.
Deleuze can be understood as supplementing Caston’s analysis on this
point. Even though Caston claims that Chrysippus goes against Plato
by dealing with conceptuality using lekta instead of existent forms, he
argues that the distinction between body and lekton is one of covariance,
which is to say one-way dependency (Caston 1999: 207), with no hint of
the autonomy of Stoic quasi-causes. Deleuze goes farther than Caston,
and points out that transforming definitions into conditionals is not the
last propositional transformation that Chrysippus advocates (Deleuze
1990: 170). In Cicero’s De Fato, Chrysippus infamously argues that
the Chaldean astrologers will have to rephrase their mantic, conditional
propositions in order for their predictions to conform to the Stoic theory
of fate.
Chrysippus imagines an oracular pronouncement: ‘If anyone is born
at the rising of the dog-star, then he or she will not die at sea’. From this,
an applied prediction is derived: ‘if some particular individual, Fabius,
is born at the rising of the dog-star, then he will not die at sea’ (Cicero
1942: 12). For Chrysippus, fate and divinatory prediction are linked.
According to one account, Chrysippus said that ‘if it were not the case
that everything is encompassed by fate, it would not be the case that

the predictions of the seers are true’.20 This oracle involves Chrysippus
in a debate with Diodorus over the necessity of past true propositions
(Cicero 1942: 13), the problem being that if you accept the necessity
of the protasis (‘Fabius was born at the dawn of the dog-star’), then
you must accept the necessity of the apodosis (‘then, necessarily, he
will not die at sea’), so long as the prediction is true (so long as the
propositions in each part do not conflict with one another, but cohere).
But, as I have already discussed, Chrysippus does not want to admit the
existence of future necessary propositions or events. Therefore, Cicero
reports, Chrysippus claims that the oracle is a true prophecy, but in
an unacceptable form. It must be ‘hygienically paraphrased’ in order to
avoid the misinterpretation of fate as necessity. Chrysippus suggests the
Chaldeans should change the form of their prophecy from a conditional
into a negated conjunction:
They will not employ conditionals expressing their observations thus: ‘If
someone was born at the rise of the dog-star, then he will not die at sea’, but
rather they will state them in this way: ‘It is not the case both that someone
was born at the dawn of the dog-star and that he will die at sea.’ (Cicero
1942: 15, author translation)
Commentators have inferred that Chrysippus means for negated

conjunctions of this kind to describe fateful but non-necessitating,
relations between events (Frede 1980: 247–8; Bobzien 1998: 157–8).
Deleuze would no doubt agree with this assessment. But why exactly
negated conjunctions are non-necessitating has been a controversial
question. The main difference between Stoic conditionals and
conjunctions seems to be that conditionals are not truth-functional,
while conjunctions are (Sextus Empricus 1842b: 2. 110–2; Diogenes
Laertius 1925: 7. 73; Bobzien 1998: 159; Caston 1999: 197; Bowden
2011: 34). That is, conditionals can be valid without being true,
or true without containing any true proper proposition (without the
propositions that make them up obtaining). For example, conceptual
relations of compatibility and incompatibility obtain between fictional
or false entities: ‘If something is a centaur, then it has a horse’s
legs and a human’s torso’. As Deleuze puts it, hypotheticals are
less concerned with real truth than with its conditions of possibility,
in other words its conceptual conditions (Deleuze 1990: 18). This
transformation of a hypothetical into a negated conjunction shows,
Deleuze thinks, that Chrysippus was aware that the compatibilities
and incompatibilities among fated events are not the same as the
compatibilities and incompatibilities among concepts, and that he

prefers negated conjunctions, or perhaps disjunctions, to hypotheticals
as the means of articulating the relations among events.
Deleuze’s Third Claim: Astrology is the Science of Evental

Compatibilities
Deleuze’s third big claim about the De Fato is closely related to the
second one. In fact, the third claim spells out the consequences of the
distinction between conceptual and evental incompatibility: the theory
of Stoic events can affirm disjunctions as disjunctive, while the field of
conceptuality cannot, but must treat disjunctions or contradictions as
purely sterile impossibilities. Deleuze says that Chrysippus considered
astrology an attempt to articulate a theory of ‘alogical incompatibilities’
(incompatibilities that do not have to do with concepts or signification),
and ‘noncausal correspondences’ (correspondences that cannot be
reduced to relations of corporeal causes among themselves). Such
correspondences and incompatibilities obtain between effects and other
effects, or events and other events. Their mutual interaction is what
Deleuze calls quasi-causality (1990: 171).
Now the Stoics contend that divining the connections between events
that occur by fate is possible by means of fatal signs (Latin: signa, Greek:
sêmeia); divination depends on the idea that ‘certain things should
be preceded by certain signs’ (Cicero 1923: 1. 118). Although Cicero
identifies divinatory signs with bodies like (among other things) cracks
in animal livers, it is not insofar as these are bodies that they are signs.
Rather, signs should be understood as propositions that come to be true
of bodies, and thus a kind of lekta. The sign is not the liver itself, but
that the liver is cracked. The same goes for astrological signs: it’s not
the dog-star itself, but that the dog-star is rising. To the extent that such
signs predict future events, divination is meant to describe a pure relation
between incorporeal lekta qua events.
Deleuze’s claim that astrological divination embodies a Stoic theory
of such relations appears to be on solid ground. The Stoics certainly
thought that understanding the future by means of divinatory signs was
distinct from understanding the relationships among causes proper:
since everything happens according to fate . . . if there were some mortal who
could perceive in his mind the connection of all causes [causarum omnium],
surely nothing would be hidden from him. For whoever grasps the causes
of future events [rerum futurarum], he necessarily grasps what will come to
be. But since nobody can do so except god, it is left to humans to divine
by means of certain signs disclosing what will follow. (Cicero 1923: 1. 127,
author translation)
The Stoics also distinguished themselves from Chaldean astrologers

who thought that signs (propositions or lekta) were causally efficacious
in the same way as corporeal causes (Sextus Empiricus 1842a: 5. 4–5).
Long (1982) helpfully distinguishes between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ astrology.
The Chaldeans are hard astrologers since they believe that the motions
of heavenly bodies (like the dog-star) are both signs and causes of
human actions; the Stoics are soft astrologers, since they hold only
that the motions of the stars are signs concerning future events, and
assign causality to another type of entity. In a passage that probably
refers implicitly to the Stoics (Bobzien 1998: 166), Augustine contrasts
those astrologers who say that the stars indicate (significant) human
actions (presumably the Stoics) with those who say that the stars make
(faciunt) human actions occur: ‘the [hard] astrologers do not usually say,
for example, “Mars in this position indicates a murderer”, but “brings
about a murderer” [homicidam facit]’ (Augustine 1963: 1. 191, 25–34).
This is, of course, precisely the kind of mantic necessitarianism that
Chrysippus wants to avoid by rephrasing the Chaldean oracle.21
So, for Chrysippus, the relation between sign and predicted event is
not necessitating to the extent that it is not causal. Deleuze appears
to be correct in saying that Stoic astrology is a theory of ‘noncausal
correspondences’. Chrysippus maintains, however, that the sign–event
relation is nevertheless universal (Bobzien 1998: 160; Caston 1999:
196). Is it therefore conceptual? For instance, in the case of people
who were born at the rising of the dog-star always dying at sea,
‘The reason why the diviners could detect this theorem is that the
divine power that governs the universe has arranged the world in
such a way that births at the rising of Sirius are universally followed
by deaths at places other than the sea’ (Bobzien 1998: 167–8). The
universality of these correspondences, however, is not in itself sufficient
to make them conceptual. Bobzien argues that the universal relations
of compatibility and incompatibility that astrology studies are only
discovered empirically a posteriori. They are not analytically derivable
from the identity of a concept (170). Furthermore, Bobzien maintains,
on the one hand, that divinatory signs are ‘causally irrelevant’, and
on the other that ‘universal regularity is not sufficient for the conflict
required in the truth-conditions [of a conditional]’ (170). That is, Stoic
soft astrology describes evental incompatibilities conflicts that are not
yet robust enough to entail conceptual ‘conflict’ or contradiction. It
is a consequence of the fact that relations between events revealed by

divination are thus distinct from both corporeal causes and conceptual
relations that Stoic fate is distinct from necessity; since the sign is
not a cause, ‘the necessity of the sign cannot be “transferred” to the
occurrent [i.e. the predicted event]’. And since the compatibilities among
events discovered by divination are not conceptual, ‘divinatory theorems
thus – in principle – allow us to know the future without themselves
necessitating the future’ (170). Bobzien supports Deleuze’s claim that
for the Stoics the compatibilities and incompatibilities among events,
which are treated by Stoic astrology, are neither causal nor logical.
Despite their universality, divinatory relations between events are not
conceptual in Deleuze’s sense, and his claim that Stoic astrology is a
theory of ‘noncausal correspondences’ and ‘alogical [i.e. non-conceptual
or non-contradictory] incompatibilities’ is vindicated.
Supplying the explanatory background and defending Deleuze’s
apparently puzzling or arch references to Stoic astrology actually tells
us a lot about how he conceives of the philosophy of events defended
in The Logic of Sense. The consequence of the distinction between
corporeal causality and evental quasi-causality, and between conceptual
and evental compatibilities, is that the latter enable us to do something
the former do not: namely, affirm divergences as divergent, affirm
disjunctions as disjunctive. Deleuze’s discussion of the noncausal and
nonconceptual relations between events in Stoicism serves to emphasise
how such compatibilities and incompatibilities are not analytically
derived from the identity of a concept. Deleuze turns away from
such analytical procedures and, inspired by Cicero, distinguishes three
sorts of synthesis: first, ‘connective’ syntheses (conexa), which take
the form of conditionals (‘if . . . then’); second, ‘conjunctive’ syntheses
(coniuncta), taking the form ‘both . . . and’; and third, ‘disjunctive’
syntheses (disiuncta), negations of the second sort (‘not both’, ‘either
. . . or’) (Deleuze 1990: 174). If the first kind of synthesis, Deleuze
thinks, is conceptual and describes the mechanism for constructing a
single series, the second and third kinds of synthesis have broader
application. They apply to both non-conceptual relations between events
and the convergence and divergence between multiple series. Deleuze
credits Chrysippus with evincing the right kind of dissatisfaction with
analytic conceptual procedure. He thinks that Chrysippus’ rephrasing
of the Chaldean prophecy makes a mantic proposition in the form of a
‘connective’ synthesis change into the form of a ‘disjunctive’ synthesis:
‘Not both: “Fabius is born at the dawn of the dog-star” and “Fabius will
die at sea”’.
Deleuze’s reading of Cicero’s De Fato enables us to perceive more

clearly what is at stake in Deleuze’s appropriation of the Stoic theory of
events. Deleuze claims that ‘the whole question’ of his appropriation of
Stoicism ‘is to know under what conditions the disjunction is a veritable
synthesis, instead of being a procedure of analysis which is satisfied with
the exclusion of predicates from one thing in virtue of the identity of
its concept’ (Deleuze 1990: 174). That is, Deleuze believes that the Stoic
theory of fate provides the conditions for affirming disjunctive syntheses
in terms that are, crucially, non-conceptual. In this way, Stoicism
conforms to Deleuze’s own philosophical assertion that concepts, and
their relations of incompatibility called contradictions, are not primary
but derived from a ‘primary, “eventmental” incompatibility’ (Deleuze
1990: 170–1). Rather than analytically deriving incompatibilities on
the basis of the identity of concepts, concepts themselves must be
synthetically produced by ‘alogically’ anterior incompatibilities between
events. Deleuze credits the Stoic theory of fate with providing a theory of
events that are all ‘positive’ since they are anterior to conceptuality and
contradiction (Deleuze 1990: 176). Even ‘disjunctive’ relations between
events (e.g., the birth and death of Fabius) are understood as genuinely
synthetic, positive rather than negative. Events by their very nature have
to be positive. Only insofar as they are related to concepts can lekta be
understood as negations of some other proposition.
And yet, almost as soon as he praises the Stoics for producing
such an affirmative approach to disjunctive synthesis, Deleuze accuses
them – basically without argument – of dropping both of the critical
features of their theory of events: the autonomy of quasi-causal
interactions among events with respect to corporeal causality, on the one
hand, and conceptual determination, on the other. Curtly, Deleuze says:
‘It seems, however, if we following the surviving partial and deceiving
texts, that the Stoics may not have been able to resist the double
temptation of returning to the simple physical causality or to the logical
contradiction’ (Deleuze 1990: 171).
Even though Deleuze mentions no texts, his appeal to their scarcity is
justified. Long and Sedley, for instance, complain that ‘no satisfactory
discussion’ of the Stoic theory of relations among events themselves has
survived (Long and Sedley 1987: 165). Bobzien, similarly, apologises for
her reconstruction of Chrysippus’ arguments about divination: ‘here we
have long left the street of sober scholarship, and followed the unmarked
path of conjecture’ (1998: 173). Perhaps Deleuze’s reconstruction of
the Stoic theory of the interconnections between events is conjectural
(he certainly doesn’t make the effort to derive it in detail from Stoic
texts), but there are texts that support Deleuze, and Deleuze can be
seen as contributing to Stoic scholarship today precisely because of the
temerity of his reading. I am thinking principally of a passage from
Sextus Empiricus, which Long and Sedley recognise hints at a Stoic
theory of the quasi-causality of events (Long 1987: 165):
[the Stoics] say, just as the trainer or drill-sergeant sometimes takes hold
of the boy’s hands to drill him and to teach him to make certain motions,
but sometimes stands at a distance and moves to a certain drill, to provide
himself as a model for the boy – so too some appearances touch, as it were,
and make contact with the commanding-faculty to make their printing in it,
as do black and white, and body in general; whereas others have a nature
like that of the incorporeal sayables [asômata lekta], and the commanding-
faculty is impressed in relation to them, not by them [ep’autoîs . . . kai oukh
hup’autôn]. (Sextus Empiricus 1842a: 8. 409; Long 1987: 163, translation
modified)
Here Sextus is referring to the Stoic theory of rational impressions

(Diogenes Laertius 1925: 7. 51), which, he reports, affect us in the
manner of lekta. The percipient soul is not directly affected by them,
as only bodies act in such a causal way. Long and Sedley imply that
incorporeal lekta thus affect the soul in a ‘cause-like’ way without
actually being causal. This passage should be read as a vindication of
the idea that the Stoics have a theory of quasi-causality that has not yet
been fully appreciated.
V. Conclusion
Deleuze’s insight lies in perceiving that the Stoic ontological
stemma – the division of ontology into existent and non-existent
‘somethings’ – constitutes a structure in which the causal relations among
existents and the quasi-causal relations among ‘subsistents’ reciprocally
presuppose one another, like two sides of a surface (Deleuze 1990:
22, 25). Deleuze admires the Stoic theory of ‘silent compatibilities
and incompatibilities’ of events articulated in terms of compatibilist
fatalism and astrological divination. Primarily, Deleuze maintains that
these Stoic quasi-causal compatibilities must be understood as distinct
from the straightforward relation between propositions and universal
or general concepts. On Deleuze’s reading, the main difference between
the three kinds of compatibilities and incompatibilities between things
in Stoicism (corporeal, conceptual and evental) is that the first two are
subjected to specific laws and rules of convergence, while the third is
the closest approximation of the completely deregulated ‘ideal game’

(Deleuze 1990: 58–65). The Stoics perceive that the rule-bound relations
among terms (corporeal causality and conceptual implication) depend
on the non-rule-bound relations between propositions in the dimension
of sense. And, according to Deleuze, this is a kind of transcendental
argument – the same as the one he discerns in structuralism. The Stoic
theory of events and sense makes the question of fate depend, in
some measure, on the paradoxical instance or ‘the contingency of an
encounter’ (Deleuze 1994: 139). The flaw in Kant’s transcendental
procedure, in contrast, is its hypothetical, conceptual form, which
presupposes a law of convergence, a kind of ideal goal or form the
condition ought to take. Deleuze calls it ‘extrinsic conditioning’. James
Williams has called Deleuze’s deregulated intrinsicist transcendental
argumentation the ‘open form’ of the selection of events (2010: 211). A
closed form involves the application of an extrinsic rule to the behaviour
of entities – it makes the condition in the image of the conditioned,
something Deleuze wants to avoid. For example, the identity of a
concept in relation to which entities are analytically related would
require denying disjunctions, rather than affirming them.
The Stoics’ conceptual innovations allow them to do something that
Deleuze thinks is unprecedented, to affirm divergent events insofar as
they diverge, rather than making divergent events exclusive of one
another. Deleuze claims that the evidence lies in the account of Stoic
astrology in Cicero’s De Fato, where even disjunctive syntheses of a
kind deemed contradictory by ordinary conceptuality, are affirmed in
Chrysippus’ theories of compatibilism and soft astrology. Rather than
an analytical philosophy in which everything is given and the occurrence
of an event is to be derived from the pre-existent identity of a concept,
the Stoics offer a ‘synthetic’ philosophy that shows how the identities
of concepts themselves can be created or produced by pre-conceptual
affiliations among multiplicities that don’t necessarily have anything in
common.
Notes
1. Boeri singles out a testimony in Clement of Alexandria as the lone extant
record of a Stoic view in which time counts as a cause. Clement takes the
process of a child learning as an example. The child’s father, Clement says,
is the ‘prokatarctic’ cause, affording the occasion for learning, the teacher
the ‘sunektic’ (or perfect) cause, the child’s character a ‘cooperating cause’
(sunergon), and time is the cause ‘sine qua non’ (hôn ouk aneu), the phrase
Boeri renders ‘necessary condition’ (Clement of Alexandria 1869: bk 8, ch. 9,

para. 25). For the Stoic pedigree of these causes, see Frede 1980.
2. In fact, Deleuze cites the same report about Stoic causality as Boeri: Clement
of Alexandria’s Stromata. Yet Deleuze, or his translator, plays fast and loose
with the Greek: ‘The Stoics say that the body is a cause in the literal sense;
but the incorporeal, in a metaphysical fashion, poses in the manner of a cause’
(Deleuze 1990: 343, n.1). A better translation of the passage would be: ‘others
[the Stoics] say that body is cause properly speaking, and that the incorporeal
is, in a manner of speaking [katakhrêstikôs], as it were causal [hoion aitiôdôs]’
(Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, bk 8, ch. 9, para. 26). It is quite economical to
render ‘hoion aitiôdôs’ ‘quasi-causally’. Deleuze likely derives this terminology
from Clement. Even though he is discussing the quasi-causality of time, Deleuze
seems to generalise this account and apply it to all the incorporeals – and to lekta
above all.
3. The resemblance between Fregean and Stoic semantics (recognised by Long
1971: 105; Graeser 1978: 78–82; Frede 1994: 119) goes back at least to Mates
1953: 19–26. Victor Goldschmidt (1954) wrote a critical notice of Mates’ Stoic
Logic in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale in which he suggests that
Mates’ treatment of Stoic incorporeals evades the hard questions posed by
Émile Bréhier, whose study deeply influenced Deleuze’s reading of the Stoics
on incorporeal lekta (Deleuze 1990: 5). It is very likely, I think, that Deleuze
knew of Mates’s claim about the similarity between the Stoic theory of lekta
and Frege’s theory of Sinn, if not directly from Mates then at least through
Goldschmidt.
4. For example, in a report from Stobeaus’ Eclogae (Long and Sedley 1987: 304),
and in Sextus Empiricus (1842a: 8. 100). The Stoics call predicates that obtain
‘sumbebêkota’, a term we have already encountered in reports about Stoic
causality (Stobaeus qtd in Bobzien 1998: 23).
5. Meinong 1960: 83–6. On the connection between Frege and Meinong, see
Dummett (1993: 22–5) who claims that both Frege’s ‘sense’ and Meinong’s ‘pure
object’ require accepting the ‘philosophical mythology’ of a ‘third realm’, which
is neither subjective nor objective (25). Dummett dislikes, while Deleuze likes,
this myth.
6. I call paradoxical elements ‘floaters’ in reference to the core text of French
structuralism, Lévi-Strauss’s Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, to
which Deleuze refers (1990: 49–50), discusses ‘floating signifiers’ as guarantors
of semantic functioning which are not themselves reducible to any particular
semantic function (Lévi-Strauss 1997: 63).
7. Daniela Voss would probably disagree with me about the relation between Frege
and the Stoics. In ‘Deleuze’s Rethinking of the Notion of Sense’, Voss claims that
‘Stoic logic has to be considered deeply non-Fregean’ (2013: 17). She holds this
view because for Frege the sense of a name or proposition is a ‘thought’, and
‘thoughts’ for the Stoics are bodies, not incorporeals (17). She says that what
Frege calls ‘sense’ is not what Deleuze calls ‘sense’. Fregean sense is exhausted
in the relations of conceptual entailment that Deleuze calls ‘signification’. I
want to say, contra Voss, that Stoic logic is importantly, if perhaps minimally,
Fregean, in the way that sense, for Frege, always outstrips reference. There
are always many senses for any given reference. As Voss puts it ‘For instance,
given the proposition that a person x is a widower, we can conclude form
this that x is a man, that x was married, and that the wife of x has died’ (4).
Whether or not all these different senses of the initial proposition remain in the
realm of ‘signification’ and not sense proper, it remains necessary to distinguish
between what Deleuze calls ‘Frege’s paradox’ (Deleuze 1990: 29), the infinite
proliferation of names of senses, and ‘Carroll’s paradox’ (18), the proliferation

of senses of names, a distinction Voss does not mark. It is not always easy to
distinguish between conceptual relations between predicates and sense relations
(see note 19 below). When Deleuze talks about the metaphysical ‘surface’, or the
‘boundary’ between bodies and lekta, I understand him to mean that this surface
lies between two series, one corporeal and one incorporeal. Just as the corporeal
‘side’ of this surface (that of denotation and signification) is subject to ‘Carroll’s
paradox’, which opens it onto the sense it excludes (16), ‘Frege’s paradox’ besets
the sense side of the Stoic surface (29): as every name has a sense, the sense
of each name then has its own name, and so on. The name ‘Aristotle’ has a
number of senses – to name just one, ‘author of the Categories’ – but that sense
of the name Aristotle must have, in turn, its own name (or names), say ‘early
Aristotle’. And that name also has a number of senses, for instance, ‘student
of Plato’ and ‘inhabitant of Athens’. Deleuze indicates that this leapfrogging
of names and senses proceeds in infinitum. There is something positive in
the Fregean regress. Together with the Carrollian regress, it constitutes the
mechanism by which the two series (which have, in general, the form of
regresses (36)) on either side of the surface ramify themselves. By means
of the Fregean regress of sense, that constantly exceeds and eludes attempts
to pin sense to an existent body, the two sides of the metaphysical surface
simultaneously communicate and retain their independence with respect to one
another.
8. To be fair, there is no exact participial Latin equivalent of ‘gignomenon’ in
Cicero. But Cicero does cite Chrysippus on the subject of motion (motus) in
order to defend Stoic claims about everything ‘happening according to fate’ (fieri
fata) (1942: 20).
9. Aetius, Placita, 1. 28. 4 (Long and Sedley 1987: 336); Cicero 1923: 1. 125;
Cicero 1942: 20.
10. Bobzien uses the neologism ‘occurrent’ to translate ‘gignomenon’ (Bobzien
1998: 26–7), in order to distinguish Stoic events from the ‘events’ of
contemporary analytical metaphysics (27). She appears to refer to the ‘property-
exemplification’ theory of events (e.g. Kim 1993: 33–52), and to suggest that
the Stoic ‘event’ may be understood as an anticipation of this theory (27, n.43),
although nothing in her argument depends on the suggestion. I will stick with
‘event’ for gignomenon, since what is crucial to these Stoic events, at least for
Deleuze, is their distinctness from bodies and causality proper. The irreducibility
of events with respect to the actually existing situation is crucial to Deleuze and
to other continental theorists of events writing in his wake (Bowden 2011: 2).
This is the sense ‘event’ possesses in that tradition.
11. I have replaced Bobzien’s uses of the word ‘thing’ with ‘event’.
12. Cicero 1942: 21, 31. For Deleuze’s reliance on this text, see Deleuze 1990: 335,
n.3; 350, n.1. For Chrysippus, bivalence holds even in the case of propositions
about the future (Long and Sedley 1987: 235).
13. See Aristotle, De interpretatione, pp. 18a27–19b4, and, for Diodorus, Sedley
1977 and Bobzien 1998: 59.
14. Boethius, On Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, II. 234, 22–6 (Long and Sedley
1987: 231).
15. I rely on Epictetus, Discourses, 2. 19, 1–5 for my reconstruction.
16. Diogenes Laertius 1925: 7. 75; see also Plutarch 1976b: 1055d–f; and
commentary in Frede 1974: 107–14; Sedley 1977: 99; Bobzien 1998: 112–6.
17. Alexander of Aphrodisias, On Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, pp. 184–5 (qtd in
Bobzien 1998: 113).
18. Alexander of Aphrodisias, On Fate, 192, 18 (qtd in Long and Sedley 1987: 337).
19. Compare Bobzien’s discussion of the Chrysippean confatalia ‘Laius will have
a son, Oedipus’ and ‘Laius will mate with a woman’, as well as ‘Milo will
wrestle at Olympia’ and ‘Someone will wrestle Milo at Olympia’ (Bobzien 1998:
217–22), which she considers to be disanalogous (despite what Chrysippus says)
to the terms in Chrysippus’ response to the ‘lazy argument’, precisely because the
relations between the former (but not the latter) are readily apprehensible on the
basis of universal relations of necessary conditionality (201–2, 222). Regarding
‘types’, Bowden plausibly argues that Deleuze is referring to the appendix to
Russell’s Principles of Mathematics (Bowden 2011: 53, n.69).
20. Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangeliae, 4.3.2 (Long and Sedley 1987: 338).
21. Augustine’s use of the verb ‘significare’ and in general the Stoic use of the term
‘sign’ to describe relationships among propositions qua events is distinct from
what Deleuze calls ‘signification’, the relationship between propositions and
universal concepts. Rather, the astrological signum is what Deleuze calls the
‘pure sign’, identified with ‘sense expressed as an event . . . [which] emanates
from nonsense as from the always displaced paradoxical instance’, and quite
distinct from signification (Deleuze 1990: 176).
References
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(ed.), trans. John L. Ackrill, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Augustine (1963) City of God, Books 4–7, trans. William M. Green, Cambridge,
MA: Loeb.
Beaulieu, Alain (2005) ‘Deleuze et les stoïciens’, in Alain Beaulieu (ed.), Gilles
Deleuze: heritage philosophique, Paris: PUF, pp. 45–72.
Bobzien, Suzanne (1998) Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy, Oxford:
Clarendon.
Boeri, Marcelo D. (2001) ‘The Stoics on Bodies and Incorporeals’, The Review of
Metaphysics, 54:4, pp. 723–52.
Bowden, Sean (2011) The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Caston, Victor (1999) ‘Something and Nothing: The Stoics on Concepts and
Universals’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 17, pp. 145–213.
Cicero (1923) ‘On Divination’, in Cicero: On Old Age. On Friendship. On
Divination, trans. William A. Falconer, Cambridge, MA: Loeb.
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Paradoxes. On the Divisions of Oratory, trans. Harris Rackham, Cambridge, MA:
Loeb.
Cicero (1949) ‘Topics’, in Cicero: On Invention, The Best Kind of Orator, Topics,
trans. Harry M. Hubbell, Cambridge, MA: Loeb.
Clement of Alexandria (1869) ‘Stromateis VIII’, in Wilhelm Dindorf (ed.), Clementis
Alexandri Opera, Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol. III, pp. 350–78.
Deleuze, Gilles [1968] (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New
York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles [1969] (1990) The Logic of Sense, Constantin V. Boundas (ed.),
trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press.
Diogenes Laertius (1925) Lives of Eminent Philosophers: 2 Vols, trans. Robert D.
Hicks, Cambridge, MA: Loeb.
Dummett, Michael (1993) Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Epictetus (1925) Discourses: Books 1–2, trans. William A. Oldfather, Cambridge,

MA: Loeb.
Frede, Dorothea (2003) ‘Stoic Determinism’, in Brad Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to the Stoics, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 179–205.
Frede, Michael (1974) Die Stoische Logik, Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht.
Frede, Michael (1980) ‘The Original Notion of a Cause’, in Malcolm Schofield,
Myles Burnyeat and Jonathan Barnes (eds), Doubt and Dogmatism, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, pp. 217–49.
Frede, Michael (1994) ‘The Stoic Notion of a Lekton’, in Stephen Everson (ed.),
Companions to Ancient Thought 3: Language, New York: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 109–28.
Frege, Gottlob [1892] (1993) ‘On Sense and Reference’, in Adrian W. Moore (ed.),
Meaning and Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 23–42.
Goldschmidt, Victor (1954) ‘Stoic Logic par Benson Mates’, Revue de métaphysique
et de morale, 59:2, pp. 213–14.
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Stoics, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 77–101.
Inwood, Brad (1985) Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, Oxford:
Clarendon.
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York: Cambridge University Press.
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Mauss’, in Alan D. Shrift (ed.), The Logic of the Gift, New York: Routledge,
pp. 45–69.
Long, Anthony A. (1971) ‘Language and Thought in Stoicism’, in Anthony A. Long
(ed.), Problems in Stoicism, London: Athlone, pp. 75–113.
Long, Anthony A. (1982) ‘Astrology: Arguments Pro and Contra’, in Jonathan
Barnes, JacquesBrunschwig, Myles Burnyeat and Malcolm Schofield (eds), Science
and Speculation, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 165–92.
Long, Anthony A. and David N. Sedley (1987) The Hellenistic Philosophers, Volume
1: Translations and Commentary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mates, Benson (1953) Stoic Logic, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
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(ed.) Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, New York: Free Press,
pp. 76–117.
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Salles (ed.), God and Cosmos in Stoicism, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 71–92.
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Cherniss (ed.), Moralia XIII, Cambridge, MA: Loeb, vol. II.
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XIII, Cambridge, MA: Loeb, vol. II.
Sedley, David (1977) ‘Diodorus Cronus and Hellenistic Philosophy’, Proceedings of
the Cambridge Philological Society, 203, NS 23, pp. 74–120.
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Collapse, 3, pp. 177–205.
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Reimer: Berlin.
Sextus Empiricus (1842b) Purrhoneioi hupotuposeis, ed. Immanuel Bekker, Reimer:
Berlin.
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Rist (ed.), The Stoics, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 203–32.
Voss, Daniela (2013) ‘Deleuze’s Rethinking of the Notion of Sense’, Deleuze Studies
7: 1, pp. 1–25.
Williams, James (2010) ‘On the Problem of Selection of Events for Deleuze and
Davidson,’ in Jack Reynolds, James Chase, James Williams and Edwin Mares
(eds.), Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Disciplinary Divides, New
York: Continuum, pp. 203–15.
Riemann–Weyl in Deleuze’s Bergsonism
and the Constitution of the Contemporary
Physico-Mathematical Space
Martin Calamari University of Verona
Abstract
In recent years, the ideas of the mathematician Bernhard Riemann
(1826–66) have come to the fore as one of Deleuze’s principal sources
of inspiration in regard to his engagements with mathematics, and
the history of mathematics. Nevertheless, some relevant aspects and
implications of Deleuze’s philosophical reception and appropriation of
Riemann’s thought remain unexplored. In the first part of the paper
I will begin by reconsidering the first explicit mention of Riemann
in Deleuze’s work, namely, in the second chapter of Bergsonism
(1966). In this context, as I intend to show first, Deleuze’s synthesis
of some key features of the Riemannian theory of multiplicities
(manifolds) is entirely dependent, both textually and conceptually,
on his reading of another prominent figure in the history of
mathematics: Hermann Weyl (1885–1955). This aspect has been largely
underestimated, if not entirely neglected. However, as I attempt to
bring out in the second part of the paper, reframing the understanding
of Deleuze’s philosophical engagement with Riemann’s mathematics
through the Riemann–Weyl conjunction can allow us to disclose some
unexplored aspects of Deleuze’s further elaboration of his theory of
multiplicities (rhizomatic multiplicities, smooth spaces) and profound
confrontation with contemporary science (fibre bundle topology and
gauge field theory). This finally permits delineation of a correlation
between Deleuze’s plane of immanence and the contemporary physico-
mathematical space of fundamental interactions.

DOI: 10.3366/dls.2015.0174
60 Martin Calamari
Keywords: Bernhard Riemann, Hermann Weyl, mathematical physics,

Gilles Châtelet, interaction, connection, fibre bundle, gauge theory,
plane of immanence
Bernhard Riemann (1826–66) constitutes one of the main figures of
Deleuze’s engagement with mathematics. ‘The conjunction of Riemann’s
mathematics and Deleuze’s philosophy’, Arkady Plotnitsky writes, ‘is a
remarkable event in the history of twentieth-century philosophy, and
it has major implications for our understanding of the relationships
between mathematics and Deleuze’s thought, and between mathematics
and philosophy in general’ (Plotnitsky 2009: 190). However, this
understanding still remains largely unexplored, beginning with the
relationship between Riemann and Deleuze itself.1
As is well known, Deleuze’s first reference to Riemann is found
in the second Chapter of Bergsonism (1966). The underlying issue
lies in Bergson’s distinction between (quantitative and qualitative)
multiplicities, and the attempt to overcome the classical dichotomy
between the One and the Multiple by affirming a substantive
multiplicity. On the background of this philosophical problem, Deleuze
synthesises, in a particularly dense passage, one of the key aspects of
Riemann’s theory of ‘multiplicities’ (manifolds):
In fact, this problem dates back to a scholar of genius, Riemann, a

physicist and mathematician. Riemann defined as ‘multiplicities’ those things
(les choses) that could be determined in terms of their dimensions or their
independent variables. He distinguished between discrete multiplicities and
continuous multiplicities. The former contain the principle of their own
metric (portaient le principe de leur métrique) (the measure of one of their
parts being given by the number of elements they contain) (la mesure d’une
de leurs parties étant donnée par le nombre des éléments qu’elles contenaient).
The latter found a metrical principle in something else, even if only in
phenomena unfolding in them or in the forces acting in them (ne fût-ce que
dans les phénomènes se déroulant en elles ou dans les forces agissant en elles).
(Deleuze 1988: 39/31–2)2
To this passage Deleuze adds a very important footnote. First, he

refers to Riemann’s famous Habilitation lecture ‘On the Hypotheses
Which Lie at the Foundation of Geometry’, dating to 1854 (but
only published posthumously in 1868). As is known, it is in this
lecture that Riemann first introduces the concept of manifold or
manifoldness (Mannigfaltigkeit). Second, he refers to one of the major
works of mathematical physics of the early twentieth century: Space,
Time, Matter (1918), by the German mathematician Hermann Weyl
Riemann–Weyl in Deleuze’s Bergsonism 61
(1885–1955). Weyl’s book constitutes the first detailed exposition

of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity; as well as, starting
in subsequent editions – on which the French translation adopted by
Deleuze is based – Weyl’s original elaboration of the first unified field
theory.3 Finally, Deleuze suggests that even Husserl, although differently
than Bergson, was influenced by Riemann’s theory.
Now, while the philosophical importance of Riemann for Bergson
and Husserl will be frequently repeated in Deleuze’s works, except for
a passing mention (which we will encounter), Deleuze never referred
to Weyl again. Thus, in most research appealing to the significance
of Riemann for Deleuze’s own theory of multiplicities, the relevance
of Weyl has been largely overshadowed (except for Plotnitsky, who
indicated this relevance), if not entirely neglected. Nevertheless, as I
would like to show, reframing the reconstruction and understanding of
the relationship between Deleuze and Riemann on the Riemann–Weyl
conjunction allows us not only to reconsider the entire Deleuzian
reception of Riemann’s figure and work, but also to extrapolate some
new aspects and implications of Deleuze’s commitment with Riemann
in his late works.
In the first part of the paper (sections I–III), I propose a detailed
analysis of the passage in Bergsonism, firstly to establish its strict
dependence on the explanation of Riemannian manifolds and space
theory found in Weyl’s Space, Time, Matter. In the second part (sections
IV–VII) is how Deleuze’s further theory of multiplicities – within his
attempt to overcome Leibniz’s closed monadological universe towards
an open nomadological ‘chaosmos’ – implies an intimate confrontation
with important twentieth-century evolvements of Riemannian geometry,
which can be precisely retraced in Weyl’s work and subsequent
developments, such as fibre bundle topology and gauge field theory.
Finally, these developments allow us to highlight how Deleuze’s ultimate
philosophical elaboration of Riemann’s thought finds a profound
correlation between the concept of ‘plane of immanence’ and the
physico-mathematical space of fundamental interactions described by
contemporary science.
I. Riemann between Mathematics and Physics

The passage in Bergsonism opens with Deleuze’s presentation of
Riemann as a physicist and mathematician. This characterisation is less
obvious than it might seem at first. The importance of Riemann’s figure
and work has always been primarily recognised for its fundamental
62 Martin Calamari
contributions to mathematics (real and complex analysis, number

theory, differential geometry, topology) while it is only after its
employment in Einstein’s theory of general relativity that it has become
an integral part of modern mathematical physics. Furthermore, the fact
that Riemann was considered primarily as a physicist is far from being
evident or even common. Deleuze’s statement requires therefore a more
attentive consideration.
To begin with, although Deleuze, throughout his work, sometimes
refers to Riemann simply as a ‘mathematician’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 482), it is again to ‘physics and mathematics’ that he relates
what defines the ‘Riemann abstract machine’ (142). Likewise, although
referring to Riemannian spaces or manifolds Deleuze links these
to ‘mathematics and physics’ (Deleuze 1995: 30), elsewhere he
reaffirms their relationship to ‘the field of physics and mathematics’
(Deleuze 2006a: 13). Finally – and even more meaningfully – Deleuze
resorts to the compact expression ‘the mathematician and physicist
Riemann (le mathématicien–physicien Riemann)’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 32/46), and on the occasion of the translation into English
of Bergsonism, writes that the term ‘multiplicity’ is of ‘physico-
mathematical (Riemann)’ origin (Deleuze 2006b: 337). Deleuze’s
characterisation of Riemann in Bergsonism is thus not accidental; on
the contrary, it reflects the Deleuzian reception and understanding of
Riemann’s work as such.
In fact, Deleuze grasps the core of Riemann’s ‘philosophy of science’,
that is, the fundamental interrelation between mathematics and physics.4
As it was for Leibniz, Detlef Laugwitz argues, ‘Riemann thought that
mathematics and physics belong closely together’ (Laugwitz 2008: 333).
This strict relationship is confirmed by several viewpoints. Riemann
devoted during his brief career and life constant and active research
to many topics of mathematical physics, such as electrochemistry,
electromagnetism, theory of heat, and hydrodynamics. A large part
of his writing and teaching activities was focused on the methods of
applying differential calculus to physics, in the lineage of Leibniz and
Newton and of his great masters Gauss, Dirichlet and Weber, as well
as the background of the French tradition of Laplace, Fourier, Poisson
and Cauchy. Moreover, several of his writings attest to his attempts to
elaborate a unified theory of physical forces, such as gravity, electricity,
magnetism and light.
But the more important corroboration of Riemann’s physico-
mathematical conception resides in the 1854 Habilitation lecture
itself. Since it is in this context, as mentioned, that Riemann first
introduces the concept of (n-dimensional) manifold, this point is of

decisive importance. In fact, if Riemann’s lecture establishes the new
mathematical foundations of modern geometry (as defined by topology
or, as it was called at the time, ‘analysis situs’ and differential geometry),
its focal point lies nevertheless in the issue of the physical applications of
the concept of manifold. In other words, what is at stake in Riemann’s
lecture is the relationship between geometry and physics.
Indeed, the profound originality of Riemann’s new approach
to geometry derives from the fact that, having determined the
mathematical condition for the construction of infinitely many spaces, or
n-dimensional manifolds, he demonstrates the possibility to construct
infinitely many geometries (see Gray 2010: 201), thus going ‘far beyond
the intellectual scheme of both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry’
(Laugwitz 2008: 225). The so-called non-Euclidean geometries are in
fact only special cases of Riemann’s differential geometry. However, the
possibility to construct infinitely many spaces and geometries imposes
the most compelling physical question of what is the proper geometry
of the real space of phenomena. What ultimately interested Riemann,
in other words, was the problem of the geometry of physical space. As
Erhard Scholz stresses, ‘The main goal of Riemann’s inaugural lecture . . .
was a reformulation of the conceptual foundations of physical geometry’
(Scholz 1992: 29; emphasis in original). Consequently, the problem that
Riemann’s theory of manifolds points out is, once again, the relationship
between mathematics and physics.
This relationship constitutes the fundamental epistemological
approach of the entire so-called Göttingen Tradition (see Mehra 2001).
Within this there is a common orientation of thought leading from
Riemann to Felix Klein, David Hilbert, Hermann Minkowski and, not
least, precisely to Hermann Weyl. ‘No mathematician of the first half
of the 20th century’, writes Laugwitz, ‘cared as much as Weyl for
greater depth of thought in analysis, geometry, mathematical physics,
and philosophy’ (Laugwitz 2008: 274). And in fact, it is Weyl who
introduced Riemann’s theory into twentieth-century mathematics, both
from the purely mathematical (topological) point of view (Riemann
surfaces) and for the physico-mathematical implications of Riemannian
geometry. It is not surprising then if Weyl, in Space, Time, Matter,
presents Riemann’s ideas as the ‘prophetical’ (Weyl 1952: 102/88)
anticipation of modern mathematical physics, as proven by Einstein’s
general theory of relativity.
It is in this perspective that Deleuze emphasises the dependence
of Einstein’s theory on Riemann’s theory of manifolds, suggesting
64 Martin Calamari
furthermore a hypothesis to found on this basis a possible confrontation

between Einstein and Bergson (see Deleuze 1988: 39). If for Deleuze,
therefore, Riemann is inseparably a physicist and a mathematician, as
well as his theory of spaces or manifolds is inseparably both physical and
mathematical, it is because of the fact that within the Riemann–Weyl
lineage Riemann’s radically new conception was acknowledged in its
inherent physico-mathematical correlation.
II. ‘Thing’ and Multiplicity: From Riemann to Deleuze

For Riemann, Deleuze states, ‘things’ are multiplicities. What defines
them as such are the parameters (dimensions, independent variables)
which they are determined by or depend on. With this general
characterisation, Deleuze seems first of all to focalise Riemann’s key
idea, namely the irreducibility of the manifold concept to any specific
domain of application, from which derives its power of determination.
In other words, according to Deleuze, any ‘object’ is, for Riemann,
determinable as a multiplicity, regardless of it being a geometric entity,
an empirical object, a physical phenomenon or a state of things. The
way in which Weyl presents Riemannian manifolds might confirm that
Deleuze may have had something similar in mind.
In introducing the principles underpinning Riemann’s ‘infinitesimal
geometry’ (differential geometry) Weyl exemplifies the varied use of
the concept of manifold from mathematics to the natural sciences
(see Weyl 1952: 84/72–3). These examples show that the concept of
manifold allows for the definition of geometric entities (e.g. a three-
dimensional space), phenomena or states of things (the state space of
an ideal gas, for instance), sensible objects (such as pure sounds and
colours), the positions of a body, or a physical system (for example, the
configuration space of a rigid body or the phase space of a mechanical
system). Weyl explains that these mathematical and/or physical ‘spaces’
as n-dimensional manifolds, are precisely defined by the values of the
parameters that determine them, that is, the n coordinates or variables
they depend on and which characterise their n dimensions. For example,
the state space of an ideal gas is a two-dimensional manifold because it
can be determined ‘by two independent variables, such as pressure and
temperature’; ‘colours form a three-dimensional manifold with respect
to quality and intensity’ and so on.
As I would suggest, some key aspects of Deleuze’s further
philosophical elaboration of the Idea as pure multiplicity in Difference
and Repetition are founded on his interpretation of Riemann–Weyl,
notwithstanding the reading of Albert Lautman’s works remains, as

known, his primary source. In turn, such aspects can clarify Deleuze’s
claim in the passage of Bergsonism that is being analysed. In endorsing
the ‘Riemannian usage of the word “multiplicity”’, in Difference and
Repetition Deleuze writes: ‘Everything (chaque chose) is a multiplicity in
so far as it incarnates an Idea’ (Deleuze 1994: 182/236). This state shows
the double meaning of Deleuze’s appropriation of Riemann’s thought.
First, the concept of multiplicity (as substantive) is raised to
the transcendental field of virtual Ideas, gaining its autonomy and
irreducibility. However, at the same time it is inseparably related
to the empirical determination (or actualisation, as a process of
differentiation and genesis) of ‘real [spatio-temporal] relations and
actual terms’ (Deleuze 1994: 183), thus implying its fundamental
immanence. Weyl’s description of Riemann’s manifolds exemplifies in
the field of mathematics and physics this sense of irreducibility and
complementarity of the manifold concept. As well as for Deleuze the
Idea is a concrete universal, a Riemannian manifold is a physico-
mathematical Idea, irreducible to, while remaining inseparable from, any
empirical effectuation.
Second, the Idea, for Deleuze, as a substantive (virtual) multiplicity,
and the immanent production of real (actual) objects, involves
the complex process of determination of the elements (dx, dy) of
the multiplicity (principle of determinability), of their differential
relations (dy/dx) or their degrees of variation (principle of reciprocal
determination), and of the values of such relations (values of dy/dx)
or degrees (principle of complete determination), to which there
corresponds a distribution of singular points (see Deleuze 1994:
171, 175). This process of determination, which shows Deleuze’s
philosophical–mathematical interpretation of the differential calculus
in the constitution of the Idea and its internal (immanent) genetic
power, is consonant with Weyl’s examples. The n-dimensional physico-
mathematical ‘spaces’ (as manifolds) imply the extension of the
differential calculus to physics (as well as to geometry), through which
actual objects, phenomena, phase transitions (in which singular or
critical points play a crucial role) or states of things are determined.
Seen in this Riemann–Weyl perspective, some important aspects of the
well-known Deleuzian definition of the Idea in Difference and Repetition
thus emerge:
An Idea is an n-dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity. Colour – or

rather, the Idea of colour – is a three-dimensional multiplicity. By dimensions,
66 Martin Calamari
we mean the variables or co-ordinates upon which a phenomenon depends;

by continuity, we mean the set of relations between changes in these
variables – for example, a quadratic form of the differentials of the co-
ordinates; by definition, we mean the elements reciprocally determined by
these relations, elements which cannot change unless the multiplicity changes
its order and its metric. (Deleuze 1994: 182–3)
The Weylian and Riemannian inspiration for this passage is

unequivocal, as attested by the example of colour as a three-
dimensional multiplicity5 or the assertion that phenomena depend on
the parameters (variables, coordinates) that determine the dimension
of the corresponding multiplicity. As for the example concerning the
continuity of a multiplicity, the reference is to the quadratic differential
form (that is, the differential expression of the square of the distance
ds or line element, between infinitesimally neighbouring points) that
properly defines a Riemannian manifold (or space).6
Deleuze’s claim in Bergsonism means therefore that every ‘thing’,
‘object’, ‘space’ or ‘phenomenon’ is a multiplicity as it actualises its
n-dimensional continuous Idea. ‘Things’ are actual multiplicities (a
colour, for instance) dependent on the virtual multiplicity (the Idea of
colour) of differential relations (and singular points) that they embody.
In turn, the virtual multiplicity remains irreducible to the actual state
of things. ‘Every «thing»’, Deleuze would later affirm, ‘is made up so
(Toute «chose» est ainsi faite)’ (Deleuze 2006b: 305/284–5; translation
modified).
III. Discrete and Continuous Multiplicities: The Problem of

Space
As I would like to show, Deleuze derives Riemann’s distinction between
discrete multiplicities and continuous multiplicities from a close reading
of an excerpt from Weyl’s Space, Time, Matter. Interestingly, such an
excerpt consists of a text overlap between Weyl’s explanation of the
Riemannian distinction and a quotation from Riemann’s Habilitation
lecture. As we shall see, the meaning of this Riemann–Weyl intersection
will be decisive for the Deleuzian elaboration.
Having highlighted that both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries
are only special cases within Riemann’s infinitely many geometries,
Weyl stresses the crucial point of Riemann’s Habilitation lecture, which
lies, he states, in its final part (see Weyl 1952: 97/83). According to
Weyl, the core issue arising from Riemann’s conception – an issue that
could only emerge properly and find adequate response with the theory
of general relativity – lies in the connection between the (infinitesimal)

geometry of space and the physical world. More precisely, once all of the
mathematical and geometrical properties of a Riemannian space have
been locally and intrinsically determined (that is, in the infinitesimal
distance between points and without the assumption of a higher-
dimensional embedding space), the question is of its compatibility with
the ‘real’ space. However, as stated previously, as Riemann outlines the
conditions for constructing infinitely many spaces and geometries, the
issue becomes the relationship between geometry and physics itself, and
hence concerns the very nature of the physical space. For Weyl, this is
the problem of space, which represents Riemann’s ultimate question.
It is with the purpose of explaining such a crucial point that Weyl
introduces the Riemannian distinction between discrete manifolds and
continuous manifolds:
I must begin by remarking that Riemann contrasts discrete manifolds, i.e.
those composed of single isolated elements, with continuous manifolds. The
measure of every part of such a discrete manifold is determined by the
number of elements belonging to it (La mesure d’une partie quelconque d’une
multiplicité discrète est donnée par le nombre des éléments qu’elle contient).
Hence, as Riemann expresses it, a discrete manifold has the principle of
its metrical relations in itself (une multiplicité discrète porte le principe de
sa métrique), a priori, as a consequence of the concept of the number.
In Riemann’s own words: ‘The question of the validity of the hypotheses
of geometry in the infinitely small is bound up with the question of the
ground of the metrical relations of space. In this question, which we may
still regard as belonging to the doctrine of space, is found the application
of the remark made above; that in a discrete manifold, the principle or
character of its metric relations is already given in the notion of the manifold,
whereas in a continuous manifold this ground has to be found elsewhere,
i.e. has to come from outside (dans une variété continue, ce principe doit
venir d’ailleurs). Either, therefore, the reality which underlies space must
form a discrete manifold, or we must seek the ground of its metric relations
(measure-conditions) outside it, in binding forces which act upon it (dans les
forces de liaison qui agissent en lui). A decisive answer to these questions can
be obtained only by starting from the conception of phenomena which has
hitherto been justified by experience, to which Newton laid the foundation,
and then making in this conception the successive changes required by facts
which admit of no explanation on the old theory . . . This carries us over into
the sphere of another science, that of physics.’ (Weyl 1952: 97/83–4)
Although Weyl points out that quantum mechanics might force us

to assume that the answer to the problem of space could be the first
hypothesis, i.e. that physical space constitutes a discrete manifold, he
68 Martin Calamari
regards the second – that physical space forms a continuous manifold – as

more consistent with Riemann’s thought (and with the space–time
continuum of General Relativity). He concludes as follows (see also
Plotnitsky 2009: 203):
Riemann rejects the opinion that had prevailed up to his own time, namely,
that the metrical structure of space was fixed and inherently independent of
the physical phenomena for which it serves as a background (indépendante
des phénomènes physiques qui se déroulent dans son sein), and that the
real content takes possession of it as with residential flats. He asserts, on
the contrary, that space in itself is nothing more than a three-dimensional
manifold devoid of all form (une multiplicité tridimensionnelle amorphe); and
that it acquires a definite form only through the advent of the material content
filling it and determining its metric relations. (Weyl 1952: 98/84)
Now, compared with the passage in Bergsonism, it is evident that

Deleuze summarises the Riemannian distinction by extrapolating nearly
literally from this lengthy excerpt of Weyl, in which, it is noteworthy,
is inserted a quotation of Riemann. This is one of Riemann’s most
celebrated quotations, taken from the concluding part of his Habilitation
lecture (see Riemann 2007: 661). The synthesis devised by Deleuze,
derives therefore from this intersection between Weyl and Riemann,
from which results – as proof of the arguments outlined above – the very
Deleuzian understanding of Riemann’s thought.
Indeed, while devoting the first and second part of his lecture to
the definition of the mathematical concept of n-dimensional manifold
and to the local and intrinsic differential geometry which it is possible
to construct upon it, Riemann dedicates the third and last part – from
which Weyl quotes – to addressing the issue of its applications to space
(see Riemann 2007: 659): which geometry of space is consistent with
the empirical world? It is in relation to this question that Riemann’s
distinction between discrete and continuous manifolds – corresponding
to the distinction between numerical or quantitative magnitudes and
spatial or topological magnitudes –7 gains its decisive relevance. Contrary
to the Newtonian absolute space (and time) and the Euclidean geometry
that founds it, Riemann’s reply is that the geometry of physical space
can not be determined a priori. The ‘real’ space is just a special case
of manifold (three-dimensional only by ‘hypothesis’), which is purely
informal (topological) in itself (‘devoid of all form’, as Weyl says),8
before any metric determination (that is, before the introduction of
the ds2 form). Therefore, in the passage quoted by Weyl, Riemann
implies that, as far as the metric relations of space with respect to the
validity of differential geometry are concerned, the problem remains

within geometry and is hence un-decidable. From the metric properties
determined on a manifold, it is indeed impossible to derive a priori
which manifold corresponds to the physical space. As a consequence, the
geometry of space can only be determined in relation to physical forces.
The question about the discrete or continuous nature of the physical
space must hence necessarily be addressed to another science, namely,
to physics. As a result, space (and time) ceases to be axiomatically
presumed as the homogeneous (Euclidean), static (invariable) and
matter-indifferent (absolute) arena in which material bodies would be
placed; on the contrary, it becomes the dynamic (variable) expression of
the fundamental physical interactions themselves.
Through his Riemann–Weyl synthesis in Bergsonism, Deleuze thus
grasps the double meaning of Riemann’s physico-mathematical theory:
the pure informal (topological) nature and autonomy of the Idea of
multiplicity, and its essential correlation with the geometry of space
(time) and physical forces. Developing his rhizomatic multiplicities
and smooth spaces in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze reaffirms this
twofold character, precisely resuming Riemann and Weyl. Like a
Riemannian space (or rather, its underlying topological space), a smooth
space is ‘an amorphous, nonformal (informel) space’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 477/595). At the same time, ‘The metrical principle’ of
rhizomatic multiplicities ‘is not to be found in a homogeneous milieu
but resides elsewhere, in forces at work within them, in the physical
phenomena inhabiting them (dans les forces qui agissent en elles, dans
les phénomènes physiques qui les occupent)’ (31/44).
IV. Riemann’s Revolution in the Lineage of Leibniz

Through the idea of n-dimensional (continuous) manifold, then,
Riemann found both the mathematical space and the physical space,
stating also their necessary interrelation. This was the starting point
of the process of geometrisation of physics that will be fulfilled by
Einstein’s theory, and that is at the core of contemporary mathematical
physics, especially within what has been called ‘the gauge field
programme’ for fundamental interactions (see Cao 1997: ch. 9–11). The
Riemann–Weyl lineage allows us to bring out some important aspects
of such developments and show Deleuze’s philosophical elaboration
of them.
For Riemann, writes Laugwitz, ‘the true laws of nature are inherent in
the infinitely small’ (Laugwitz 2008: 261). This claim, for our purposes,
70 Martin Calamari
has two interrelated physico-mathematical meanings, which reveal

Riemann’s deep relationship to Leibniz.9 First, it means that physical
laws are fundamentally expressible through differential equations, that
is, through the differential calculus, of which Leibniz (along with
Newton) is, as is known, the founder. For Riemann, in other words,
the true mathematics for physics is indisputably the differential calculus.
Analysis (complex and real) has for him the pre-eminence in all
mathematics, and even his concept of manifold, hence his ‘analysis
situs’ and differential geometry, emerge as an extension of the calculus.
Thus, according to Riemann, natural laws must be searched in a strict
interrelation between analysis, geometry and physics, and therefore
inherently described by means of differential equations.
Second, the claim above implies the idea, already underlined by
Leibniz, that natural forces can only act by continuous action; that is,
by local (infinitesimal) contact, and by their progressive transmission
through the surrounding space. For this reason, as Riemann specifies,
natural laws are ‘in general partial differential equations’ (cited in
Laugwitz 2008: 260), since they involve a change in physical quantities
dependent on several variables, and not merely one, as with ordinary
differential equations of classical mechanics (of which Newton’s laws
of motion are the model). This viewpoint proves that, in contrast
to the idea assumed in Newtonian mechanics of action at a distance
between bodies (particles or material points), namely, the idea of forces
acting instantaneously regardless of the distance, Riemann conceived
of mathematical physics as a field physics (see Laugwitz 2008: 257),
although he did not arrive at the concept of the field itself, which was
introduced later by Faraday and Maxwell.
Now, both aspects of Riemann’s view of natural laws in the lineage
of Leibniz are crucial to Deleuze’s philosophical elaboration. With
regard to the first, it is at this point that we encounter Deleuze’s
second (and otherwise unique) explicit mention of Weyl in his later
works. In The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque Deleuze ascribes to Weyl
the statement for which ‘a law of Nature is necessarily a differential
equation’ (Deleuze 1993: 47). However, as has just been seen, such a
formulation can be traced back precisely to Riemann, revealing thus its
physico-mathematical sense. Indeed, in one of his seminars on Leibniz,
Deleuze stated that ‘one cannot understand anything about infinitesimal
analysis if one does not see that all physical equations are by nature
differential equations’ (Deleuze 1980b). Therefore, as I would suggest,
it is again within the Riemann–Weyl lineage that Deleuze maintains
that the differential calculus (through the differential relation, dy/dx) is
what ‘made possible this kind of co-penetration of physical reality and

mathematical calculus’ (Deleuze 1980a). Consequently, what Deleuze
seems to rigorously grasp from Riemann and Weyl is that natural
laws are ‘necessarily’ conceived as differential equations, and thus as
inherently infinitesimal (differential), because in the lineage of Leibniz
modern analysis, geometry and physics have become the differential
‘sufficient reason’ of mathematical physics, that is to say, of the physico-
mathematical explanation of Nature.
This leads us to the second aspect of Riemann’s conception of the
laws of nature. As remarked by Weyl himself (see Weyl 1952: 66),
Riemann’s affinity with Leibniz’s continuous and infinitesimal vision
implies a clear opposition to the Newtonian mechanical model of
physical interactions and, conversely, a profound proximity to the field
theories of Faraday and Maxwell: ‘The principle of gaining knowledge
of the external world from the behaviour of its infinitesimal parts is
the mainspring of the theory of knowledge in infinitesimal physics (la
physique des actions de contact) as in Riemann’s geometry’ (Weyl 1952:
92/79). In this sense, continues Weyl, ‘The transition from Euclidean
geometry to that of Riemann is founded in principle on the same idea
as that which led from physics based on action at a distance to physics
based on infinitely near action’ (91). In other words, whereas Euclidean
geometry and Newtonian mechanics are based on global axioms and
instantaneous interaction at a distance (as in Newton’s law of universal
gravitation), Riemannian geometry and the field physics of Faraday
and Maxwell are based on the local, intrinsic construction of space
and on progressive contact interactions, propagating through space (as
in Faraday’s ‘lines of force’, or rather, field lines, and in Maxwell’s
equations for electromagnetism).10
Riemann’s rejection of action at a distance in favour of a
field–theoretical approach in the lineage of Leibniz is thus evidence
that the problem of interactions (forces) is shifted from bodies, and
their bi-univocal relation (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 370), to the
continuous space (field) between bodies. This fundamental displacement
discloses the ‘continuous–discontinuous’ dichotomy, dating back in its
basic outline to Leibniz and Newton, which characterised nineteenth-
century science, as well as its reductionist tendencies (see Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 370), becoming finally, as is known, one of the
main problems of twentieth-century physics after Einstein’s quantum
revolution: namely, the wave–particle duality. Ultimately, with his
theory of continuous manifolds, Riemann was looking to overcome
the Euclidean–Newtonian framework of space, time and matter, and to
72 Martin Calamari
provide an entirely new description of the physical space of fundamental

interactions.
V. Beyond Leibniz: Riemann’s Demand of Opening

Despite the profound affinity between Leibniz and Riemann, there is
nevertheless a crucial point of divergence. In A Thousand Plateaus
and The Fold, Deleuze argues that Riemann’s conception, as drawn
and developed in contemporary mathematics and physics, implies
a fundamental change of Leibniz’s thought, which is consonant
with the demand of contemporary philosophy (by Whitehead, for
instance, but even more so in Deleuze’s own philosophy) to overcome
Leibniz’s ‘monadological’ metaphysics. In order to underline Riemann’s
contribution to these neo-Leibnizian tendencies, and thus to show
Riemann’s detachment from Leibniz, Deleuze draws heavily on
the mathematician and philosopher Gilles Châtelet (1944–99). To
comprehend Deleuze’s ultimate philosophical elaboration of Riemann’s
ideas, it is thus necessary to consider some aspects of Châtelet’s writings.
In his paper entitled Sur une petite phrase de Riemann,11 Châtelet
focalises the critical point posed by Riemann in the conclusion of
his Habilitation lecture, of which we have already seen the relevance
for Weyl and Deleuze.12 Interweaving the ‘continuous–discontinuous’
dichotomy implied in Riemann’s text with Leibniz’s concept of monad,
Châtelet observes:
How to found the metric of physical space? If this space were discrete, a
natural class of metrics would be imposed immediately because the discrete
tolerate only a limited proximity for each of the elements. But space is
given as a continuous manifold in mathematical physics, if one admits the
possibility of communication between monads, communication provided
by the transmission of signals that follow the path of greatest proximity.
(Châtelet 2010: 91; emphasis in original on the word ‘continuous’)
With this argument, Châtelet underlines a decisive problem. Once

accepted the Riemannian hypothesis for which physical space is a
continuous manifold indiscernible from physical phenomena, it becomes
necessary to admit local interactions (or ‘communication’, as Châtelet
terms it), which can be transmitted through space. Châtelet has here
clearly in mind Maxwell’s and Einstein’s theories. ‘General relativity’,
he writes, indeed provides ‘an answer to Riemann’s question’ (Châtelet
2010: 92).
But the problem lies elsewhere. As we have seen, the admission of local
interactions corresponds to Riemann’s field–theoretical approach to
mathematical physics. This entails the idea of action by contact, contrary
to the idea of action at a distance assumed in Newtonian mechanics.
Nevertheless, and here is the point, to admit local interactions involves at
the same time a criticism addressed to one of the fundamental conditions
of Leibniz’s monadology: the condition of absolute closure which defines
the monads (see Deleuze 1993: 22–26, 81–2). Contrary to Newton
(or more prudently, to the Newtonians), Leibniz advocated the idea
of action by contact, as something expressing the physical mechanism
of extrinsic movement. However, since each monad, in its closure,
integrally includes the totality of the world, all action must necessarily
be internal to the monad. Consequently, in Leibniz’s metaphysics there
is by no means, in the narrow sense, a proper idea of interaction between
monads.
It follows that Riemann’s hypothesis, regained and proven in modern
physics, compels the rejection of the condition of closure which defines
Leibnizian monads, demanding on the contrary a condition of opening.
This ‘openness’ implies, according to Châtelet, ‘communication’ and
‘coexistence’, founded in the infinitesimal (differential) proximity of
interactions. In other words, and in terms later resumed by Deleuze (see
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 485, 493, 574), ‘differentiation’, Châtelet
writes, ‘propagates step-by-step (de proche en proche) in this community
of monads which involve tactile relations described by a kind of tension
which might be called connection’ (Châtelet 2010: 90; emphases in
original). Now, without entering into technical details, it is nevertheless
important to understand the origin and meaning of the term ‘connection’
as used here by Châtelet for describing interactions.
VI. The Genesis of Fibre Bundle Topology and Gauge Field

Theory
In his paper on Riemann, Châtelet employs the modern mathematical
and physical notion of ‘connection’ in its current understanding – as is
meant in the mathematical theory of fibre bundles (bundle connection)
and in physical gauge field theories (gauge connection).13 Despite the
independent development of these theories (at least to a certain extent,
as we will see), I wish to first of all emphasise that their historical genesis
can be traced back precisely to the works of Weyl, and specifically, to
his extensions of Riemannian geometry and Einstein’s general theory of
relativity.
74 Martin Calamari
The original notion of ‘connection’, first introduced in 1917 by Levi-

Civita in his work on the parallel transport of vectors in Riemannian
geometry, was further developed by Weyl – and also in the fundamental
works of the French mathematician Élie Cartan (1869–1951) – in his
‘purely infinitesimal geometry’ (see Scholz 2001). Weyl started by
liberating Levi-Civita’s notion of parallel transport from its dependence
on a metric, and the embedding of the Riemannian manifold on
which parallelism is defined into an external Euclidean tangent space.
Levi-Civita’s parallelism was, in fact, an extrinsic notion, in conflict
with Riemann’s conception of geometry. Indeed, as underlined by
Lautman, one of the decisive aspects of Riemannian geometry is
that it is an intrinsic differential geometry. The space (as manifold)
and its properties (curvature, for instance) are defined without any
reference to an external ambient space, a ‘universal container’ (Lautman
2011: 112), as Newton’s absolute space. Following Cartan, Lautman
shows how Levi-Civita’s notion of parallelism (which Cartan called
‘Euclidean connection’) on Riemannian manifolds entailed instead the
introduction of the extrinsic and external viewpoint considering the
manifold ‘as embedded in a Euclidean space to a sufficient number of
dimensions’ (113). Indeed, Lautman points out, ‘the exterior tangent
planes, the projections and the rotations implied by the parallelism of
Levi-Civita only make sense with respect to the space in which the
manifold is embedded’ (115).
Weyl is credited with having achieved the first intrinsic formulation
of parallelism by elaborating the concept of ‘affine connection’ (now
called ‘linear connection’) on (differentiable) manifolds, subsequently
extended to the ‘projective’ and ‘conformal’ cases. The concept of
‘affine connection’ was conceived for the mathematical (geometrical)
description of (continuous) infinitesimal displacements of vectors in
tangent (affine) spaces over manifolds. However, in Weyl’s main
intentions, such a concept had first of all a physical meaning within
the framework of his attempt to formulate a unified field theory
of the fundamental interactions known at the time (gravity and
electromagnetism), thus also incorporating Einstein’s theory of general
relativity.14
In this context, according to Weyl, for reaching a ‘purely’ local and
intrinsic infinitesimal geometry it was first necessary to remove from
Riemannian geometry the presence of what he understood as a last
vestige of the Euclidean ‘geometry at a distance’ (Weyl 1952: 102),
something also present in Einstein’s theory, namely, the possibility of a
direct comparison of lengths (specifically, the length of vectors) located
at distant points. The most important consequence of Weyl’s approach

was that it involved a path-dependence of spatial and temporal lengths;
that is, a local change in the length scale from point to point of
space–time. This locality entailed a relativity of the standard of length
(or unit of scale), and therefore the existence of variable scale factors.
This is what Weyl expressed by introducing the idea of a gauge system
(see Cao 1997: 105–6, 271–73), for which he required a necessary gauge
invariance, that is, an independence with respect to any particular choice
of unit length (or gauge). Thereby, Weyl’s unified field theory represents
the first formulation of a local gauge theory.
Nevertheless, although Weyl’s theory was applauded at first, above
all by Einstein himself, the latter addressed soon thereafter some cogent
criticisms, showing that this was in conflict with physical observations,
hence revealing its failure. Towards the end of the 1920s, Weyl’s further
research, partly solicited by the discovery of two new fundamental
interactions (the weak and the strong), convinced him to utilise the
gauge idea in the context of quantum mechanics, although in a suitably
modified manner (precisely, not as a scale factor but as a phase factor
of the wave function of quantum particles). This reformulation is the
foundation of the modern meaning of the gauge principle (see Cao 1997:
271–5, 332–8), which stimulated new programmes of unification for the
fundamental interactions within the framework of quantum field theory.
Starting from these developments, a decisive step was achieved in the
1950s by the elaboration of modern gauge field theories (the so-called
Yang–Mills’ theories) that constitute today the core of the Standard
Model of elementary particle physics.
From the mathematical point of view, starting from the 1930s,
Weyl’s (and Cartan’s) general concept of ‘connection’ on manifolds
was extended and reworked in the theory of topological fibred spaces,
thanks to the major contributions to algebraic and differential topology
provided by mathematicians like Hopf, Seifert, Whitney, Serre and
Ehresmann.15 The last had by the mid-1940s introduced the concept
of ‘infinitesimal connection’ on fibred spaces, leading to the first ‘global
theory of connections’. Finally, Norman Steenrod published in 1951 the
first monograph on the topology of fibre bundles (see Steenrod 1951),
providing what has since become the modern meaning of this field of
mathematics.16
Intuitively, a fibre bundle can be thought as a kind of ‘enlarged’
topological space composed by a base space B (an n-dimensional
manifold) and a total space E (or bundle space) ‘above’ the base space
(generally, the total space is endowed with a group structure, in which
76 Martin Calamari
case the fibre bundle defines what is known as a principal fibre bundle).
The total space is composed by the fibres F, in correspondence with each
point x of the base space. The simplest example of a fibre bundle is
the so-called product space (E being equal to the product of B with F),
which is a trivial fibre bundle; for example, a cylinder, with a circle as a
base space and a line segment as the fibre. A classical example of a non-
trivial fibre bundle, in contrast, is the Möbius strip, which resembles the
product space locally, but not globally (it is ‘twisted’). It is important to
note first that each fibre is in itself an m-dimensional manifold. Thus, a
fibre bundle is not simply a multi-dimensional space as any Riemannian
or other topological spaces generally are, but a (n+m)-dimensional space.
Second, and most importantly, the total space is in contact with the
base, through the bundle projection (a continuous map) – the third basic
component of the fibre bundle – which acts from the total space E to the
base space B ( : E → B). This means that the total space is extrinsic,
in Lautman’s sense, to the base space, but not external to it. In other
words, the total space is formally distinct from, and irreducible to, the
base space, but this does not imply that the total space need be conceived
as a higher-dimensional ambient space in which the base space would be
embedded. On the contrary, each fibre of the total space is an internal
space, constituting the internal dimensions of the fibre bundle, although
they are the extra dimensions of it. Finally, a bundle connection is an
additional geometric structure that permits to compare infinitesimally
neighbouring fibres and to describe the paths connecting them.
The topology of fibre bundles marks a theoretical renewal of
Riemannian geometry. However, it must be noted that during the
1950s, when fibre bundle theory and gauge field theory had achieved
their modern formulation, such theories were completely independent
and unrelated to each other despite their common origins (Riemannian
geometry, Einstein’s general relativity and unified field theories). For this
reasons, what is more important to stress here is that in the mid-1970s
the physicists T. T. Wu and C. N. Yang were astonished to realise that
gauge theories could be reframed and adequately formulated precisely
through the mathematics of fibre bundle topology; we shall return
to this in more detail. Moreover, this profound relationship between
physical theories and topological–geometrical structures allowed for
the understanding of a similarity between gauge theories and the
theory of general relativity itself (see Cao 1997: 334). Ultimately, these
extraordinary results have finally led to a new and more profound
understanding of the interdependence between mathematics and physics.
VII. The Contemporary Physico-Mathematical Space and

Deleuze’s Plane of Immanence
Precisely these developments underlie Châtelet’s interpretation and
Deleuze’s ultimate philosophical elaboration of Riemann’s thought.
The interrelation between mathematics and physics envisaged by
Riemann’s differential geometry and field–theoretical approach to
physics, is by Châtelet understood in deep continuity with contemporary
mathematical physics, as evidenced by fibre bundle topology, gauge field
theories and modern interpretations of general relativity.17
In his paper Le potentiel démoniaque. Aspects philosophiques et
physiques de la théorie de Jauge,18 Châtelet proposes an interpretation
of gauge theory in its fibre bundle formulation, showing how it
definitively breaks the ‘idealised’ model of Euclid–Newton’s space,
time and matter, establishing, on the contrary, the ‘effective’ space of
what he calls, evocatively, ‘fibre-monads’ (also ‘fibre-particles’). The
revolutionary aspect of gauge theory, Châtelet suggests, lies in the
definitive abandonment of the ‘pure’ (i.e. absolute) representation of
classical (pre-Riemannian and pre-Einsteinian) geometry and physics,
affirming instead the inseparable ‘coupling’ of mathematical structures
and physical reality. In this way, Châtelet writes in a crucial passage,
‘through the simultaneous dissolution of the categories of «purely
geometrical» and «purely physical», it [the gauge theory] establishes
a proper physico-mathematical space’ (Châtelet 2010: 95; emphasis
in original). How, then, does the gauge theory of elementary particle
physics and fibre bundle topology attain this ‘space’?
‘Each monad [i.e., particle]’, Châtelet writes, ‘testing a path in the
universe B [i.e., in the base space of the fibre bundle] establishes
a kind of synthesis associated to each path’ (Châtelet 2010: 100).
This extremely succinct passage – which, as we shall see, will be
taken up by Deleuze – condenses some key aspects of how the
topological–geometrical structure of fibre bundles actually operates
within gauge theory. To understand this, let us begin by briefly
summarising some of the basic features of gauge field theory.19
According to the Standard Model of particle physics, of which gauge
theories represent the theoretical framework, elementary (quantum)
particles are quanta indissolubly coupled to quantum fields. This
means that all quantum particles are field quanta. Quantum fields are
distinguished into two main types: (fermionic) matter fields, and their
associated particles (fermions), such as electrons and quarks; (bosonic)
force fields, and their associated particles (bosons), such as photons
78 Martin Calamari
and gluons. In gauge theory, force fields are known as gauge fields.
Since these are the quantum fields that describe (non-gravitational)
fundamental interactions, namely, electromagnetic, weak and strong
forces, gauge fields are also defined as interaction fields. While fermions
are actual quanta of matter (that is, the constituent of ‘ordinary’ matter),
bosons are conceived as virtual quanta of force (interaction), and are
called gauge bosons. Gauge bosons are virtual particles responsible for
the transmission of interactions. For instance, photons are the gauge
bosons that mediate electromagnetic interactions. In a nutshell, gauge
theory can then be thought of as the quantum field theory of matter
(matter fields) and force (force fields).
However, more important are the interactions between matter and
force. Indeed, one of the key aspects revealed by quantum field theory
is that in order for a quantum particle to exist, it must interact with
some quantum field. In other words, a universe without interactions can
not exist at all. Accordingly, since quantum particles are manifestations
of interacting quantum fields, gauge theory is the theory that describes
the dynamic processes of interaction between matter (matter fields) and
force (force fields).
A quantum particle (as a quantum of matter field) interacting with
a gauge field (force field) is affected by it. The resulting effect is
observable as a change in the internal states of the particle (for
example, a phase change in the wave function). What is the effective
cause of this change? In classical field theories (Maxwell’s theory of
electromagnetism, for instance), changes were entirely ascribed to the
influence of the (electromagnetic) field, or rather, its strength, that is, the
intensity of the field. Mathematically, however, the problem is that for
calculating the field strength one has to introduce some potential (for
example, the electric scalar potential and the magnetic vector potential
in the case of electromagnetism) in the form of potential functions,
which allows to represent the ‘tension’ (to use Châtelet’s expression in
a previously quoted passage) of the field. The fundamental potentials in
gauge theory are called gauge potentials. What is their more precise role
and why are potentials problematic?
The point is that potentials have always had an ambiguous status
within physics, beginning with their well-known ‘arbitrariness’. The
electric and magnetic potentials in Maxwell’s equations, for instance, are
invariant under a gauge transformation, that is, they leave the electric
and magnetic fields completely unchanged. Thus, are the potentials
actual physical entities, as fields are, or are they simply useful, but
conventional and arbitrary mathematical devices permitting calculations
for deriving fields? For our purposes it is sufficient to highlight that

during the last fifty years important experiments have in fact established
the physical reality of potentials, stating the fact that they determine
observable effects not entirely attributable to the field strength (the most
important example here is the so-called Aharonov–Bohm effect).20 In
short, such experiments have demonstrated that the phase differences of
quantum particles interacting with gauge fields are physically determined
precisely by the gauge potentials. Therefore, they are not merely
mathematical tools, but the field strength, or gauge field strength, is
a quantity derived from them. In sum, gauge field potentials are the
effective cause of changes in the internal states of matter fields.
What relationship can there be between such aspects of gauge
field theory and fibre bundle topology? As previously mentioned,
this is precisely what Wu and Yang proved in the mid-1970s. Fibre
bundles provide the topological–geometrical structure that describes the
dynamics of quantum field (matter fields and gauge fields) interactions.
What Wu and Yang demonstrated was that gauge fields are principal
fibre bundles (with a so-called Lie group as symmetry group), in
which the base space is the space–time manifold, while the total space
describes the dynamics of the internal states of interacting matter and
force quantum fields (where force fields are principal fibre bundles and
matter fields are so-called associated vector bundles). Each fibre at any
space–time point thus corresponds to the internal (extra) dimension (the
internal symmetry space) of quantum fields. In other words, the total
space of the fibre bundle can be thought of as the ‘space of phases’ of
a quantum particle moving through the base space (the space–time) and
interacting with a quantum field (an electromagnetic field, for instance).
As we have seen, phase differences are physically determined by the
gauge potentials of the gauge field. In the fibre bundle formulation gauge
potentials are indentified with the bundle connection, which describes
the changes of the phase (amounting to a kind of ‘twisting’ of the
fibres) along a path at different space–time points. The corresponding
gauge field strength is then instead associated to the curvature of the
connection. Because phase changes imply the curvature of the connection
to be non-zero (that is, not ‘flat’), the topology of the fibre bundle in
gauge theories is, in general, ‘twisted’, which is to say, non-trivial.21
This is what encloses Châtelet’s passage quoted above. The space–time
paths of the ‘monads’ (particles) in the base space are correlated to the
fibres in the internal (extra) dimensions of the total space (the ‘space
of phases’). This space, through the connection (the gauge potential)
and its curvature (the gauge field strength), ‘synthesises’ the dynamics
80 Martin Calamari
of the fundamental interactions. The potential, associated with the

connection, ‘creates the quanta of the force field’ (Châtelet 2010: 106),
namely, the virtual particles (gauge bosons) of the interaction field
(gauge field), while by the non-zero curvature of the connection ‘the
monad experiences the rebellion of space to every capture through
a Cartesian grid (quadrillage)’ (106), that is, through a trivial fibre
bundle. The non-zero curvature indicates thus the non-trivial (‘twisted’)
nature of space, or, as Châtelet stresses, the ‘heterogeneity of space’
(105; emphasis in original). The fibre bundle formulation of gauge
theory then describes, Châtelet suggests, the open space of the virtual
‘potentialities’ and ‘intensities’ of matter, where the ‘monads’ (particles)
are necessarily coupled to the ‘fibres’ (quantum fields), which are
themselves ‘affected by the indomitable exteriority of the others’ (100).
In brief, the ‘fibre-monads’ are necessarily modified by interaction
processes of matter and force. Ultimately, through the identification of
the connection (a topological–geometrical notion) with the potential
(finally an experimentally stated physical entity), the mathematical
physics of fibre bundle topology and gauge field theory fulfils the
condition of opening originally demanded by Riemann, and attains the
neo-Leibnizian perspective of the contemporary physico-mathematical
space.
This is exactly what Deleuze derives from Châtelet, condensing in a
short but illuminating passage in The Fold what he defines as ‘the new
monadology in mathematics since Riemann’ (Deleuze 1993: 154, n.16):
Modern mathematics has been able to develop a fibered conception according
to which ‘monads’ test the paths in the universe and enter in syntheses
associated with each path. It is a world of captures instead of closures.
(Deleuze 1993: 81)
As should be evident, this passage paraphrases that by Châtelet

which we have analysed above, thus revealing which mathematical
and physical implications it makes implicit reference to.22 What is
important for Deleuze here is that such aspects of contemporary
science enable him to point out one of the major limits of Leibniz’s
metaphysics, that is, the condition of absolute closure which grounds
his monadology, and therefore to show the difference with what he
defines as the neo-Leibnizianism which characterises contemporary
philosophy. Indeed, contrary to Leibniz’s monadic closure, and to
the requisites of convergence and compossibility, the contemporary
universe, Deleuze argues, is a ‘chaosmos’, an open world in becoming,
in which ‘Beings are pushed apart, kept open through divergent series
and incompossible totalities that pull them outside’ (Deleuze 1993: 81).
However, this outside, as we shall see, is not an external, supplementary,
dimension, but the intrinsic opening to the field of interactions, to
‘changing captures’ (81), in which ‘the monads penetrate each other, are
modified’ (137).
As a consequence of this affirmation of openness and interaction
in accordance with contemporary science, Leibniz’s ‘monadological’
metaphysics, as Deleuze had underlined already in A Thousand Plateaus,
must be replaced by a new ‘nomadological’ perspective (see also
Plotnitsky 2009: 206):
Although the ‘monads’ are no longer thought to be closed upon themselves,

and are postulated to entertain direct, step-by-step (de proche en proche)
local relations, the purely monadological point of view proves inadequate and
should be superseded by a ‘nomadology’ (the ideality of striated space versus
the realism of smooth space). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 574, n.27/616,
n.26)
The classical ‘ideality’ of Euclid–Newton’s space, time and matter,

and also the conditions of closure, convergence and compossibility of
Leibniz’s monadology, are thus rejected in favour of the nomadological
realism of the contemporary physico-mathematical space.
Deleuze’s philosophical elaboration in his late works finds therefore
a deep correlation with contemporary mathematical physics. Deleuze’s
theory of rhizomatic multiplicities and smooth spaces discloses the
field of interactions, and thus the connection and heterogeneity
of multiplicities (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7). Deleuze’s
famous description of a Riemannian space as ‘pure patchwork’ finds
here its original sense: an heterogeneous, ‘amorphous collection’ of
infinitesimally neighbouring ‘patches’ of space, the connections of
which are not predetermined, and ‘do not imply an ambient space in
which the multiplicity would be immersed’ (493). Like the internal
(extra) dimensions of fibred spaces in gauge theory that ‘capture’
fundamental interactions, Deleuze’s field of interactions characterises the
open space of ‘extrinsic coexistence’, the plane or ‘milieu of exteriority’
of connections, as ‘extrinsic relations’ (435, 353).
However, this extrinsic field of interactions and connections should
not be confused with an external dimension that could encompass
the multiplicities. On the contrary, just as the internal dimensions
of a fibre bundle, as we have seen, are extrinsic without being
external, Deleuze’s multiplicities (as well as Riemannian manifolds)
also have no supplementary dimensions of embedding (see Deleuze and
82 Martin Calamari
Guattari 1987: 9). For this reason, Deleuze, following Lautman, opposes
the connection of Riemannian spaces (‘accumulation’), or smooth
spaces, with what he terms ‘Euclidean conjunction’ (486, 573, n.19).
Indeed, the latter, Deleuze argues, consists in overlaying ‘upon each
point of smooth space a tangent Euclidean space endowed with a
sufficient number of dimensions’ and then in reintroducing ‘parallelism
between two vectors, treating multiplicity as though it were immersed in
this homogeneous and striated space’ (373, 556, n.39). The ‘Euclidean
conjunction’ to which Deleuze refers corresponds therefore to nothing
other than Levi-Civita’s parallel transport of vectors on Riemannian
manifolds (that is, an ‘Euclidean connection’ in Cartan’s terminology),
which, as we have seen, precisely implied an extrinsic and external
viewpoint, opposed to Riemann’s intrinsic differential geometry.23 Thus,
I would suggest, Deleuze’s field of interactions (and connections) and
the multiplicities might be then conceived of more adequately as a (non-
trivial) fibre bundle, in which the base space would correspond to the
multiplicities and the total space to the internal (extra) dimensions of
interactions and connections, a virtual field of ‘heterogeneous potentials
and intensities’ (Deleuze 1994: 50).
This entails that the condition of opening affirmed by Deleuze does
not imply that the field of interactions (and connections) constitutes
an external space with respect to the multiplicities, while defining a
proper and irreducible ‘milieu’. To better understand this point, let us
return briefly to Deleuze’s interpretation of Leibniz’s monadic structure.
Despite the condition of closure, Deleuze shows that even Leibniz’s
monad possesses ‘a minimum of outside’, however, as he states, ‘a
strictly complementary form of outside’ (Deleuze 1993: 111). What is
of interest to us is that, in elucidating this kind of complementarity,
Deleuze refers to the topological property of ‘unilaterality’ of the monad,
which implies ‘a torsion of the world, an infinite fold, that can be
unwrapped (se déplier) in conformity with the condition [of closure]
only by recovering the other side, not as exterior to the monad, but
as the exterior or outside of its own interiority’ (111/149). The topology
that Deleuze has in mind here is thus precisely that of a Möbius strip
(see also Deleuze 1990: 20, n.10, 337), which, as we have seen, is itself a
non-trivial fibre bundle. Indeed, in The Logic of Sense Deleuze, following
Lautman, had already underlined that to grasp the one-sided character of
the Möbius strip it is necessary to split it ‘by unfolding it in its length (en
le dépliant dans sa longueur), by untwisting it (en le détordant)’ (Deleuze
1990: 20/31; translation modified). According to Lautman, this proves
that the unilaterality is an extrinsic (or ‘relational’) property ‘since, to
be realised, it is necessary to split the ring and untwist it, which implies
a rotation around an axis exterior to the surface of the ring’ (Lautman
2011: 117). For this reason, Deleuze maintains it is only by ‘unfolding’
the surface that ‘the dimension of sense [i.e. the outside] appears of
itself, in its irreducibility, and also in its genetic power’ (Deleuze 1990:
20). Nevertheless, it can be shown that the unilaterality is reducible to
the Möbius strip’s intrinsic property of being non-orientable, that is,
‘folded’ and ‘twisted’ (non-trivial) in itself (see Lautman 2011: 117–8).
Therefore, the outside is strictly complementary (not exterior, or rather,
not external) to the monad because, as with a Möbius strip, the extrinsic
property of unilaterality is equivalent to the intrinsic property of non-
orientability. At the same time, however, this equivalence does not
eliminate the difference and heterogeneity (irreducibility) of the outside
with respect to the monad.
Deleuze conceives of the relationship between the field of interactions
(and connections) and the multiplicities, in the same manner. If there
is between them a reciprocal irreducibility, which assures an extrinsic
(outside) dimension of openness, at the same time, they also possess
a strict complementarity that prevents any kind of transcendence. The
field of interactions (and connections) corresponds then to what Deleuze
calls the ‘plane of consistency’ of multiplicities, which defines precisely
their internal exteriority; that is, their pure immanence. Indeed, the
plane of consistency constitutes the ‘outside of all multiplicities’, whose
dimensions ‘increase with the number of connections that are made
on it’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 9), while remaining a single, pure
plane of immanence: the ‘not-external outside and the not-internal
inside’, or simply, the ‘absolute outside’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:
59–60). Ultimately, the topology of Deleuze’s plane of immanence, as
field of interactions and connections, and the multiplicities which fill it,
appears to be that of a kind of folded and twisted (non-trivial) fibre
bundle, which finds its correlate in the physico-mathematical space of
contemporary science.
Notes
1. The most important studies on Deleuze and Riemann are Plotnitsky 2006 and
2009. In general, for Deleuze’s engagement with mathematics and science, see
DeLanda 2002; Duffy 2006; Marks 2006.
2. All page references to Deleuze’s works are made distinct by the use of the slash,
referring first to the English version and secondly to the French. This is true in
general of all authors quoted.
84 Martin Calamari
3. The French edition of 1922, as well as the English edition of 1952, correspond to
the 1921 fourth enlarged German edition of Weyl’s book, originally published
in 1918. For a detailed analysis of Weyl’s masterwork see Scholz and Coleman
2001.
4. In general, see Laugwitz 2008; specifically, Boi 1992; Scholz 1992; Monastyrsky
2008.
5. The example of colour, as a continuous manifold, is already present in
Riemann’s lecture (see Riemann 2007: 653). Deleuze’s other source for this point
(as in general for Riemann’s theory) is certainly Jules Vuillemin, which refers to
Helmholtz (see Vuillemin 1962: 409, n.2).
6. Deleuze’s source for the differential quadratic form of a Riemannian space is
Lautman (2011: 97–8), which depends on Cartan and Weyl. See Weyl 1952: 90.
7. For discussion on Riemann’s distinction see, for example, Laugwitz 2008:
305–8, and in relation to Deleuze, Plotnitsky 2006.
8. The French term ‘amorphe’ would become a typical Deleuzian characterisation
of Riemannian manifolds, as well as of smooth spaces (see Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 476, 477, 485, 488). See also Lautman 2011: 98, and for an analysis,
Plotnitsky 2006.
9. On Riemann and Leibniz see Laugwitz 2008, but also, in relation to Deleuze,
see Plotnitsky 2009.
10. This correlation established by Weyl between Riemannian geometry and
Faraday–Maxwell field theory is also analysed by Charles Alunni (2006),
showing its relevance for Bachelard.
11. Originally published in 1979, this paper is now included in the new edition of
Châtelet’s works (see Châtelet 2010: 85–94). All quotations of Châtelet are my
translations.
12. Note that the phrase by Riemann to which the ‘Proustian’ title of Châtelet’s
paper refers is precisely that which we encountered in Weyl, and that Deleuze
synthesises in Bergsonism.
13. For an introduction to fibre bundles and bundle connections, see, for example,
Isham 2001: ch. 5, 6; Penrose 2005: ch. 15. For an historical account see
Bourguignon 1992.
14. For all these aspects see Coleman and Korté 2001. For an historical
reconstruction of Weyl’s theory in the framework of the attempts of unified field
theories in the early twentieth century, see the excellent study of P. V. Vizgin
2011.
15. Note, en passant, that Ehresmann, the first great scholar of Cartan, was a close
friend of Lautman. On the relevance of this friendship for Lautman’s philosophy
of mathematics, see the challenging remarks laid out by Fernando Zalamea in
his introduction to Lautman’s works (Lautman 2011: xxxv, 267, n.14).
16. For the historical developments of fibre bundle topology from the strict
mathematical (algebraic and topological) viewpoint see Dieudonné 2009.
17. As Châtelet himself observes, ‘modern presentations of general relativity by the
mathematical physicists utilize always more the language of “fibred spaces”
(“fibrés”)’ (Châtelet 2010: 290, n.15).
18. For indications about the various versions and published forms of this paper see
Châtelet 2010: 302.
19. It is clearly beyond the scope of the present paper to provide a detailed discussion
of gauge theory. For a detailed account see Zeidler 2011, and for philosophical
analyses see Brading and Castellani 2003; Healey 2007.
20. Note that, in another important paper, Châtelet too, discusses the
Aharonov–Bohm effect, considering it as a compelling example of the new
physico-mathematical space introduced by gauge theory (see Châtelet 2010:

109–31).
21. The fibre bundle is trivial in the Abelian case of quantum electrodynamics (in
the absence of magnetic monopoles), while it is non-trivial in the more general
non-Abelian Yang–Mills’ theories for the weak and strong interactions.
22. Note that Deleuze always refers to Châtelet’s paper on Riemann, although the
passage cited here from The Fold is clearly extrapolated from the second paper
by Châtelet that we have considered. This proves, given their relationship as
colleagues and friends, that Deleuze must have read Châtelet’s paper on gauge
theory, at least in one of its versions.
23. Note Deleuze’s subtle conceptual displacement between ‘Euclidean connection’
and ‘Euclidean conjunction’ for indicating Levi-Civita’s parallelism, and the
opposition between the latter and the proper ‘connection’ of Riemannian spaces
(‘accumulation’); see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 486, 510.
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between Mathematicians and Physicists, Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.
Kanafani in Kuwait: A Clinical
Cartography
Mai Al-Nakib Kuwait University
Abstract
The trope of Kuwait runs through numerous stories by Palestinian
writer Ghassan Kanafani, including his well-known novella, Men in the
Sun. Using Deleuze’s clinical methodology, this paper maps Kanafani’s
Kuwait stories symptomatically to determine what the legacy of the
Kanafani effect might be for contemporary Kuwait. It considers what
his textual conjunction of affects and percepts did at the time and
whether they can do anything now. Kanafani’s position as a seminal
figure within Palestinian national and resistance literature is well-
recognised; however, his specific location in Kuwait at a key period of
its development is generally overlooked. His clinical diagnosis of the
relationship between Kuwait and Palestinians in the 1940s and 1950s
can provoke a reconsideration of that early period, especially relevant in
light of post-1991 events. In addition to his writing, his actual presence
in Kuwait in the second half of the 1950s expresses an early promise
of Kuwait as an open and cosmopolitan place soon betrayed and today
mostly forgotten.
Keywords: Ghassan Kanafani in Kuwait, Deleuze’s literary clinic,
symptomatology, health, cartography, fabulation, Kanafani effect
In Ghassan Kanfani’s most well-known novella, Rijal fi al-shams (Men
in the Sun), Abu Qais, one of three men who die in a water tank in
the process of being smuggled across the desert from Basra to Kuwait,
describes Kuwait as a destination full of ‘all the things he had been
deprived of’ (Kanafani 1983: 13/46).1 He believes that ‘what only lived
in his mind as a dream and a fantasy existed there’ (Kanafani 1983:
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2015.0175
Kanafani in Kuwait: A Clinical Cartography 89
13/46). It is, unlike Palestine, a place with no trees but ‘with sacks of
money’ to compensate (Kanafani 1983: 13/46). The trope of Kuwait
looms large in a number of Kanafani’s stories. It is more than a locale
or destination; it becomes a place-holder for what has been lost. In
Kanafani’s nuanced depictions, however, Kuwait never quite lives up
to expectation. As it turns out, and as Kanafani’s texts demonstrate
early on, Kuwait can provide no viable solution to Palestinian
woes.2
The 1948 Nakba coincided with the period of Kuwait’s oil production
and its efforts to establish the institutions necessary for its imminent
independence as a nation-state. Kuwait opened its doors to Palestinian
immigrants who were experienced, highly educated and fully equipped
to help Kuwait through its passage into modernity, which they did.
On the surface, this symbiotic relationship flourished for decades, and
the years of Kanafani’s stay correspond with the beginning of this
unique aggregate. The Palestinian community in Kuwait developed into
a vibrant, self-sustaining entity. It was responsible for the financial
support of Palestinian refugee communities all over the Arab world. It
was culturally and socially dynamic, with organisations championing the
preservation of Palestinian handicrafts, the development of Palestinian
children’s education, and the advocacy of Palestinian women’s rights,
among many other things. Perhaps most significant was the community’s
political contributions; Fatah was founded in Kuwait by Yasser Arafat,
who came in 1957 as a teacher, like Kanafani and so many other
prominent Palestinian intellectuals and future activists and leaders.
However, as the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion suggests, something
other than mutual benefit must also have been taking place. I suggest
it is this other relation between Palestinians and Kuwait that Kanafani’s
texts diagnose.
Deleuze argues that writers, like doctors, are ‘astonishing
diagnosticians or symptomatologists’ (Deleuze 1990: 237). He explains:
Clinicians who are able to renew a symptomatological table produce a work

of art; conversely, artists are clinicians, not with respect to their own case, or
even with respect to a case in general; rather they are clinicians of civilization.
(Deleuze 1990: 237; Smith 1997; Lambert 2000)
One role of the literary critic can be to map symptoms organised by

artists and writers in order to assess what might be done with their
diagnoses; to consider, for example, whether such diagnoses might be
put to work toward otherwise ignored ethical considerations (Smith
90 Mai Al-Nakib
1997: lii).3 Bruce Baugh calls this ‘a revolutionary pragmatics of reading’

(Baugh 2000: 34). Baugh describes the two movements involved in
such a reading process: first, a consideration of ‘whether a work is
in fact capable of producing certain effects, and [. . . ] determining the
nature of those effects’; and, second, considering ‘whether a given effect
furthers the objectives of an individual or group (whether the effect is
helpful, harmful or indifferent)’ (Baugh 2000: 34). While such clinical
cartographies may produce unexpected effects, there is no guarantee
such effects will be sensed (actualised) within a given milieu; they may
remain untimely (Deleuze 1983: 107).
Beyond symptomatology, Aidan Tynan argues in his recent study,
Deleuze’s Literary Clinic, that it is imperative to consider how Deleuze’s
‘critique et clinique’ project ‘relates to the later schizoanalytical work
developed with Guattari’ (Tynan 2012: 4). As a schizoanalytical (and
not exclusively a diagnostic or symptomatological) process, Tynan notes
that Deleuze’s literary clinic is both pragmatic and experimental; it ‘has
to do with the problem of political engagement as well as the status of the
creative process in relation to the life process’ (Tynan 2012: 5–6). This
marks ‘the literary clinic’s transition from diagnostics to therapeutics’
(Tynan 2012: 170). A schizoanalytical pragmatics of reading, thus, goes
beyond assessment or evaluation (but not as far as judgement); it puts
the literary machine in question to work towards change (Deleuze 1995:
7–8, 21–2; Buchanan 2000: 97).
Using Deleuze’s clinical methodology, this essay reads Kanafani’s
Kuwait stories both symptomatically and pragmatically in order to
determine what the legacy of the Kanafani effect might be for
contemporary Kuwait (whether it can be put to work).4 What exactly
were Kanafani’s fabulations of Kuwait? What, if anything, did this
textual conjunction of affects and percepts do at the time, and can it
do anything now? If, as Deleuze states, ‘it is the task of the fabulating
function to invent a people’, is it only the Palestinians as a missing people
that Kanafani’s texts produce or is there some connection to Kuwait
itself (to Kuwaitis as a missing people) (Deleuze 1997: 4)? Kanafani’s
position as a seminal figure within Palestinian national and resistance
literature is well-recognised; however, his specific location in Kuwait at
a key period of its development is generally overlooked.5 I believe his
clinical diagnosis of the relationship between Kuwait and Palestinians in
the 1940s and 1950s can provoke a critical reconsideration of that early
history, especially relevant in light of the displacement of the Palestinian
community in Kuwait after 1991. In addition to his writing, I suggest his
actual presence in Kuwait in the second half of the 1950s, on the cusp
of Kuwait’s independence from Britain, expresses an early promise of
Kuwait as an open and cosmopolitan place, a promise which, since the
turn of the millennium, has been mostly forgotten.
I. Literary Clinician
In 1948, with Acre, the town of Kanafani’s birth, occupied by Zionists,
he and his family fled to southern Lebanon, eventually ending up in
Damascus. Kanafani was twelve years old at the time. In 1952, at
the age of sixteen, Kanafani taught Palestinian refugee children at a
United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school, while
simultaneously studying Arabic Literature at Damascus University. It
was during this pivotal early period that Kanafani began to write stories
and to become active in politics – the twin preoccupations of his life. In
1955, not yet twenty, Kanafani moved to Kuwait to join his brother
and sister. Like so many Palestinians, including the narrator of his
epistolary story, ‘Waraqa min Gaza’ (‘Letter from Gaza’), Kanafani was
under contract with the Kuwait Ministry of Education. In addition to
teaching art at al-Ghazali public school, Kanafani started to publish
short stories in earnest during his six-year stay. Among others, some of
these stories include: ‘Waraqa min Gaza’ (‘Letter from Gaza’); ‘Lulu fi
al-Tariq’ (‘Pearls in the Street’); ‘Ard al-Burtuqal al-Hazin’ (‘The Land of
Sad Oranges’); ‘al-Qamis al-Mesruq’ (‘The Stolen Shirt’); ‘Ka‘k ‘ala al-
Rasif’ (‘The Cake Vendor’); ‘Fi Janazeti’ (‘In My Funeral’); and ‘Mawt
Sarir 12’ (‘Death of Bed 12’). His story ‘The Stolen Shirt’ won the Kuwait
Literary Prize in 1958. Kanafani was also an active journalist during his
time in Kuwait. He regularly published articles in Kuwaiti magazines
and in Kuwaiti newspapers, such as al-Taleea. Kanafani associated with
members of Kuwait’s liberal intelligentsia and Arab nationalist activists,
including Ahmed al-Khatib (founding member of the Arab Nationalist
Movement [ANM] with George Habash and other key figures in 1951).
In 1960, Kanafani left Kuwait to Beirut to join the editorial staff of
George Habash’s new political magazine, al-Hurriyya.
Significantly, as Karen E. Riley mentions in her biographical preface
to Kanafani’s collection of stories, Palestine’s Children, Kuwait was also
where the writer was first diagnosed with severe diabetes. If at twelve
Kanafani was forced to confront the fragility of a homeland, in his early
twenties he was faced with the transience of life itself. In a letter sent
from Kuwait to a friend, he wrote:
92 Mai Al-Nakib
When I was twelve, just as I began to perceive the meaning of life and nature
around me, I was hurled down and exiled from my own country. And now,
now, just as I have begun to perceive my path . . . along comes ‘Mr. Diabetes’
who wants, in all simplicity and arrogance, to kill me. (Quoted in Riley
2000: 5; see also al-Naqib 1972: 196)
In his 1984 study, Muhammad Siddiq attributes Kanafani’s early

pessimism over the lack of political consciousness among Palestinians
to the fact that he was still at ‘such a close remove from the disaster
of 1948’ (Siddiq 1984: 8). Siddiq argues that ‘greater distance in
time and more positive developments of the Palestinian scene would,
in due course, enable Kanafani to view the pre-1948 past within a
wider, and consequently more accurate, historical perspective’ (Siddiq
1984: 8–9). However, Riley also relates Kanafani’s general pessimism
about the Palestinian situation during this period to his understandable
anxiety over his diagnosis (Riley 2000: 5). Although, as Riley mentions,
Kanafani would soon enough learn to take his illness in stride, I bring it
up here in relation to his early writing as a way to connect the clinical
and the literary.
Regarding the link between a writer, illness and literature, Deleuze
states:
The writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician of
himself and of the world. The world is the set of symptoms whose illness
merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of health: not that
the writer would necessarily be in good health [. . . ], [rather] he possesses an
irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of
things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage
exhausts him, while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant
and substantial health would render impossible. (Deleuze 1997: 3)
Certain authors – including those Deleuze writes about extensively, such

as Kafka, Artaud, Fitzgerald, Proust, Nietzsche and others – suffer from
weak health. Their sickness often provides a singular, not to say
easy, perspective or experience of the world. As Deleuze puts it: ‘The
writer returns from what he has seen and heard with bloodshot eyes
and pierced eardrums’ (Deleuze 1997: 3). Through their writing, such
authors are sometimes able to transmute their physical weaknesses into
strengths. ‘It is’, as Deleuze explains, ‘a process, that is, a passage of Life
that traverses both the liveable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from
becoming’ (Deleuze 1997: 1). Thus understood, health is not reducible
to the physical body of an individual. Health, understood as writing, as
literature, is a matter of invention.
For Deleuze and Guattari, a work of art or literature preserves

‘a compound of percepts and affects’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:
164). However, the percepts and affects preserved by an artwork or a
literary text are not reducible to the personal perceptions or feelings of
the one who produces them (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164; Smith
1997: xxxiii–xxxv). The work must, as they put it, ‘stand up on its
own’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164). The function of writing is
to fabulate – that is, to create a monument, not in commemoration of
the past via memory but, rather, in view of the future by forming
a compound of sensations via words, syntax and sounds (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 168–9). An encounter with such compounds of
sensation, such literary monuments, can transform received opinions
(understood as affective and perceptive states grouped in habituated,
often inadequate ways) (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 174). A great
writer, for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘is above all an artist who invents
unknown or unrecognised affects and brings them to light as the
becoming of his characters’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 174). Doing
so is a clinical process, a matter of diagnosing ‘the illnesses of the lived’
in order to ‘[summon] forth a people to come’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 173, 176). It involves the extraction of overlooked percepts and
affects and, further, the invention of a people who are missing (Deleuze
1997: 4). By writing for these people who are missing, writers – from
Kafka to Kanafani – create an otherwise invisible or inaccessible form of
health; that is to say, they invent new possibilities for and becomings
of life. I suggest that the proximity between Kanafani’s diabetes and
the loss of Palestine itself (not just his own personal loss but a loss
experienced by a collectivity that suddenly found itself missing) prepared
the conditions for him to emerge not simply as a writer but as a literary
clinician.
II. Kuwait Stories

So then, what symptoms do Kanafani’s Kuwait texts in particular
diagnose? And in response to this illness, what new percepts and affects
do his texts create? I focus here on four texts either written in Kuwait or
soon after his departure: ‘Letter from Gaza’ (1956), ‘Pearls in the Street’
(1958), ‘Death of Bed 12’ (1960), and Men in the Sun (1963). I suggest
these texts diagnose Kuwait not as a haven for Palestinians – as was
commonly perceived and felt – but, rather, as a place fraught with perils
and contradictions that would inevitably make a certain version of life
for Palestinians unsustainable in the long run. Kanafani’s texts construct
94 Mai Al-Nakib
in advance what would prove to be the case three decades later.6 Even
further, as we shall see, the breadth of symptoms Kanafani’s stories map
suggests that his prognosis applies not only to the particular condition
of Palestinians in Kuwait but to Kuwait itself and, more broadly, to all
its contemporary and future citizens and residents.
Kuwait as percept in the aforementioned stories is not reducible to
mere setting or backdrop. Over and over again, Kuwait is figured as
the promised land that never fails to disappoint. For example, in one
of his earliest stories from 1956, ‘Letter from Gaza’, Kuwait appears
as an escape but only in the sense of a temporary layover on the way to
bigger and better things: to ‘green California, far from the reek of defeat’
(Kanafani 1983: 87/344). The unnamed narrator portrays his experience
in Kuwait as follows:
My life there had a gluey, vacuous quality as though I were a small oyster,
lost in oppressive loneliness, slowly struggling with a future as dark as the
beginning of the night, caught in a rotten routine, a spewed-out combat
with time. Everything was hot and sticky. There was a slipperiness to my
whole life, it was all a hankering for the end of the month. (Kanafani 1983:
87/343)
Kuwait promises money, but the gifts the unnamed narrator brings back
to Gaza are of no use to his thirteen-year-old niece, her leg recently
amputated from the thigh as a result of an Israeli bomb (Kanafani 1983:
89/349). ‘Letter from Gaza’ extracts Kuwait’s sticky vacuity as affect in
the assemblage between, on the one hand, desperate people and, on the
other, a place they create in their imagination first and then, over the
years, with the sweat of their labour, but to no avail. Life in Kuwait,
even with a secure job, remains slippery; no roots can be set down. The
future is dark and as difficult to pry open as an oyster shell. The story
ends with the narrator back in Gaza – the place he has always hated for
its failures, has always dreamed of fleeing – imploring his friend to come
back. Gaza is described in much the same terms as Kuwait – ‘closed like
the introverted lining of a rusted snail-shell thrown up by the waves on
the sticky, sandy shore by the slaughterhouse’ (Kanafani 1983: 88/344).
However, this story suggests it is nonetheless better for Palestinians than
Kuwait can ever be, despite its promise of wealth and the mobility wealth
brings.
In another early short story, ‘Pearls in the Street’, from 1958, one
of the narrators, Hasan, states that people back home describe the
unnamed Gulf city where he works as the ‘valley of gold’ (Kanafani
2004: 97/158). The unnamed country’s oil fields and pearls give it
away as Kuwait. Hasan tries to divest his desperate, unemployed friend,

Saad al-Din, of his misguided belief in the inevitability of success in
Kuwait:
‘I told him the wheel that revolved here was legendary for its harshness
and didn’t give a damn for individual human beings. Hunger, I told him, was
merely an amusing spectacle for people living in luxury; people here were
straining after every penny and didn’t turn back to look at the others crawling
behind them.’ (Kanafani 2004: 97/158)
Hasan’s warnings fall on deaf ears, however. Saad al-Din is trapped

in the unnamed country with no prospects, but, as Hasan points out,
‘“Like everyone else who comes here, he wanted a miracle, a miracle to
fill his pockets with gold, and take him very gently by the hand and lead
him home on a red carpet!”’ (Kanafani 2004: 97/159). Near destitution,
Saad al-Din takes one final chance by purchasing a pile of oysters sold
by a street vendor in the hopes that one of the shells will contain a pearl.
Upon opening the final shell, Saad al-Din collapses of a heart attack.
Hasan never discovers whether his friend ‘“died from the elation of
seeing a pearl in that last shell, or from disappointment because he knew
it was empty”’ (Kanafani 2004: 100/163). By the time Saad al-Din’s
body is removed from the street and Hasan comes back to find out, ‘“the
man with the shells had disappeared”’ (Kanafani 2004: 100/163). Once
again, Kuwait as percept is disappointment and let down. Even those
unlike Saad al-Din who have secure jobs are depicted as ‘suffocating’ and
trapped in an unrewarding routine (Kanafani 2004: 95/155). The land of
oil produces a population that is, at least in part, self-serving and without
sympathy. Whereas traditional pearling necessarily creates affects of
patience, attentiveness and community, oil production cultivates haste,
greed and fracture. The new population lacks the capacity required to
consider how the social and economic structure under construction as
a result of oil would not likely be conducive to the development of a
democratic polity able to consider the needs and aspirations of the less
fortunate. In the new economy, pearling is reduced to a cheap trick in
the street, the ‘wretched looking man’ selling the oysters, like Saad al-
Din himself, is another victim of oil (Kanafani 2004: 98/160).7
In the 1960 story, ‘Death of Bed 12’, Kuwait is, once again, figured as
the place of great riches (Kanafani 2004: 120/139). In a made-up story
he tells himself about a recently deceased Omani man in a hospital in
Kuwait, the narrator, himself a patient in the same hospital, imagines
the man’s motivation to migrate as follows:
96 Mai Al-Nakib
In a year or two he’d return to Oman and swagger through the alleys of
Ibkha wearing a brilliant white aba with a golden hem, like the one he’d
seen draped across the shoulders of one of the notables of Ras el-Khaymah.
(Kanafani 2004: 120/139)
The narrator goes on to picture the Omani man’s disappointment upon

his actual arrival in Kuwait:
And when at last they sighted the coast, and the masts of the boats lying
moored in the quiet harbor [sic] of Kuwait, Muhammad Ali Akbar found
himself responding ambivalently to a reality now divorced from the colorful
[sic] world of his dreams. (Kanafani 2004: 121/139)
The unnamed narrator describes what Muhammad Ali Akbar’s

perceptions and feelings about Kuwait might have been; this description
could just as easily belong to the narrator himself or to Kanafani or any
new immigrant to Kuwait:
The packed streets, the size of the buildings, the grey sky, the incandescent
heat, the hot northerly wind, the streets jammed with cars, the serious faces
. . . all of these things seemed to impose a barrier between himself and his
dream. He wandered around aimlessly, without direction, in that ocean of
people, feeling lost and vertiginous in the swim of faces, and believing with
the utmost conviction that those faces which did not so much as look at
him were declared enemies, that these people, and their sheer numbers, were
the walls obstructing the outset of the road to his new future. Things were
not as simple as he’d imagined before leaving Ibkha. Nothing appeared to
have connectives here or to be sequential. It seemed the roads he walked
were without end, that they circled a wall which embraced everything [. . . ].
(Kanafani 2004: 121/140)
The estranging quality of the unfamiliar city could well apply to any
alien locale, any difficult immigrant experience. However, the affects of
hopelessness and disconnection from others (described as enemies who
obstruct rather than enable dreams) are extracted over and over again
in Kanafani’s Kuwait stories. Kuwait’s lack of connectivity to itself (in
the form of links to its past or future) and to those who are helping
to constitute its modernity (those who come to build better lives for
themselves) limits what the nation-state might become. Like the other
stories mentioned, ‘Death of Bed 12’ suggests Kuwait’s trajectory is a
trap – a road that circles a wall that embraces everything.
The narrator comes to this diagnosis in a hospital by way of an
encounter with another’s death and his own illness. His experience
opens up what he calls ‘holes’ or ‘ulcers’ in his head (Kanafani 2004:
113/127–8). It allows him to recognise the extent to which ‘the problem
remains the problem of the end, whether it entails annihilation or

immortality’ (Kanafani 2004: 127/149).8 This problem is not merely
an individual, psychological affair. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in
relation to Kafka, it is a collective concern, a matter of the people’s future
(Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 17–18). The unnamed narrator perceives,
‘how much we’re prisoners of our minds and bodies!’ (Kanafani 2004:
127/150). He goes on:
We forever ascribe our own qualities to others, and judge them through the
manner of our formulated thoughts and opinions. In short, we want them
to be ‘us’, we try to conceive of them as satellites of ourselves, we hope that
they see with our eyes, feel with our skins, and in addition we attempt to
saddle them with our past, and our own particular way of facing life, and
place them within the framework which our current understanding of time
and place dictates. (Kanafani 2004: 127/150)
This, as the narrator discovers, is a troubling, homogenising tendency

that can lead to nothing socially beneficial. Kanafani’s clinical
assessment provides an accurate prognosis of what such dichotomising
affects would likely generate. His diagnosis not only helps explain
the aftermath of the 1990 invasion on Palestinians; it also remains
completely relevant to the sectarian extremism currently on the rise in
Kuwait.9 Deleuze states:
The Palestinians are what’s untimely in the Middle East, taking the question
of territory to its limit. In unconstitutional states it’s the nature of the
necessarily nomadic processes of liberation that counts. And in constitutional
states, it’s not established and codified constitutional rights that count but
everything that’s legally problematic and constantly threatens to bring what’s
been established back into question that counts. (Deleuze 1995: 153)
Recent demonstrations in Kuwait, challenging the constitutionality of

the Amir’s modification of the voting law in October 2012, constitute
such a threat. This challenge is overt. However, I would argue that the
untimely virtual presence of the missing Palestinians in Kuwait today, as
expressed through Kanafani’s Kuwait stories and elsewhere, constitutes
a different kind of potential intervention with constructive implications,
though it is not, for the moment, widely perceived.
Men in the Sun, published in 1963, three years after Kanafani left
Kuwait, intensifies the percepts and affects of the short stories discussed
above through its more complex form. The novella uses repetition,
multiple perspectives, and non-chronological temporality to extract the
percepts of danger and betrayal from the landscape and the affects of
alienation and entrapment from the characters. As part of Kanafani’s
98 Mai Al-Nakib
literary clinic, Men in the Sun challenges the undoubtedly widespread

political and military disappointment of Palestinians in the late 1950s
and early 1960s. It reveals the understandable urge to focus on the
personal (that is, individual fortunes and family responsibilities) at the
expense of the national and collective to be a flawed solution. By
disrupting linear development, the novella’s formal techniques call into
question the viability of the contemporary perception, on the one hand,
of Kuwait as promise and, on the other, of material security as a way
out.
Repetition is one of the formal techniques utilised throughout Men
in the Sun. As in the other Kuwait stories discussed, Kanafani’s novella
repeatedly depicts a Kuwait perceived by Palestinians to be the promised
land of wealth and opportunity and, at the same time, the inadequacy
and speciousness of this perception. The word Kuwait is repeated over
thirty times in the story, almost always as promise or betrayal. Abu Qais
sees Kuwait as ‘a dream and a fantasy’ where he will be able to earn
‘sacks of money’ (Kanafani 1983: 13/46); Assad believes ‘“a man can
collect money in the twinkling of an eye there”’ (Kanafani 1983: 19/61);
and sixteen-year-old Marwan vows to ‘send every penny he earned to
his mother and overwhelm her and his brothers and sisters with gifts
till he made the mud hut into a paradise on earth’ (Kanafani 1983:
29/85). Abul Khaizuran – the man the three men pay to smuggle them
into Kuwait – provides the counter to these idealisations, informing the
naive Marwan: ‘“I’m glad you are going to Kuwait, because you will
learn many things there. The first thing you will learn is: money comes
first, and then morals”’ (Kanafani 1983: 28/84). Abul Khaizuran – an ex-
freedom fighter who lost his ‘manhood’ in a bomb explosion ten years
earlier – embodies Kuwait as avarice (though he is not himself Kuwaiti)
(Kanafani 1983: 37–8/109–10). A smuggler of human beings employed
by a rich Kuwaiti smuggler ‘“of more important things”’, Abul
Khaizuran cares only for his own interests (Kanafani 1983: 35/100).
He declares to Assad, ‘“I want more money, more money, much more.
And I find it difficult to accumulate money honestly”’ (Kanafani 1983:
40/114). So he smuggles desperate Palestinians across the desert in a
metal tank, risking their lives for a few dinars. When he finds Abu Qais,
Assad and Marwan dead in the tank, he decides to dump them in the
trash heap at the edge of town so that ‘“they would be discovered
in the morning and buried under official auspices”’ (Kanafani 1983:
55/148). He leaves them, drives off, and then returns to pilfer the change
from their pockets and, significantly, Marwan’s watch (Kanafani 1983:
56/151). For the three men, Kuwait turns out to be no paradise at all.
The novella is told from the perspective of the four main characters.
The third-person omniscient perspective used throughout is primarily
subjective, but at times it pulls back into objective mode. At other times,
without warning and within the same paragraph, it slides into second-
person, addressing the character directly (Kanafani 1983: 9–10/37–8).
Thoughts occasionally merge together. For example, riding through the
desert heat, their thoughts about Kuwait are presented simultaneously,
and it is not clarified who is thinking what:
They used to be told that someone wasn’t coming back from Kuwait because
he’d died; he’d been killed by sunstroke. [. . . ] This desert was like a giant in
hiding, flogging their heads with whips of fire and boiling pitch. But could
the sun kill them and all the stench imprisoned in their breasts? The thought
seemed to run from one head to another, laden with the same suspicions.
(Kanafani 1983: 48/131–2; see also 46/129)
Kanafani’s complex narrative style produces a polyvocal effect that calls

into question the seeming autonomy of the characters and perhaps,
by extension, the autonomy of any migrant Palestinian.10 While the
titles of the first three sections are the names of each of the three men
who will die together in a tank in the desert in the middle of August,
the varying, overlapping narrative perspective belies this division; it
holds the characters together despite their differences. This merging of
subjectivities challenges the ‘every man for himself’ mentality that runs
through this and the other Kuwait stories, a mentality that ends in
catastrophe for the characters over and over again. As such, Kanafani’s
literary clinic calls forth a collectivity missing at the time – a Palestinian
people-to-come no longer paralysed and humiliated by defeat, able to
plan beyond their immediate material exigencies.
Another technique that traverses Kanafani’s novella is a temporal
shifting from present to past and back again. Movements from present
to past are almost imperceptible textually, as markers from the present
context hark back subtly to something in the past and vice versa. To
give only one example of many in the novella: as Assad negotiates
with a smuggler in Basra to take him across the border to Kuwait,
he recollects his experience with Abul-Abd, the smuggler who he had
hired to take him across the border from Jordan to Iraq. The narrative
jumps back and forth between his earlier experience and the present,
held together by recurring signs. As he trekked across the blazing
desert, abandoned by Abul-Abd, ‘the earth turned into shining sheets
of yellow paper’ and then, jolted back to the present, in the office of
the smuggler in Basra, ‘suddenly the yellow sheets began to fly about,
100 Mai Al-Nakib
and he stooped to gather then up’ (Kanafani 1983: 18/59). Yellow

sheets traverse past and present, challenging linearity. This technique is
used extensively in the first three sections and, like the shared narrative
perspectives, holds the three characters together despite their ostensible
separation. Kamal Abdel-Malek describes these repeated words that
run through the text as ‘connective tissues between writing segments,
between units of time and geography’ (Abdel-Malek 1999: 183). They
appear as ‘liminal entities . . . [that] act like a bridge, or isthmus,
between blocks of past events and present ones’ (Abdel-Malek 1999:
182). In Men in the Sun time is durational rather than chronological;
that is to say, it expresses the interpenetration of past and future
within any present and the impossibility of separating time out into
quantifiable units (Bergson 1910: 104). This non-habituated perception
of temporality not only makes it possible to consider the myriad
elements of the past – often overlooked or forgotten – that compose
the present but also takes seriously the ongoing potential effects such
elements can have in the present and future (Deleuze 1991: 97). It
is an understanding of temporality as a process of becoming and
experimentation; it underscores the opportunities for transformation
always available despite the harsh brutalities of the present. As Baugh
puts it:
when literature fractures this order [the linear chronology of Aristotelian
plot], it allows moments to be related to each other in multiple, non-linear
ways; instead of a straight line from past to present to future, there are many
curved lines that can pass through points on the line in an order other than
linear succession. (Baugh 2000: 51)
Edward Said argues that Men in the Sun’s temporal instability expresses
how:
impelled by exile and dislocation, the Palestinian must carve a path for himself
in existence, which is by no means a ‘given’ or stable reality for him. Like the
land he left, his past seems broken off just before it could bring forth fruit; yet
the man has family, responsibilities, life itself to answer to, in the present. Not
only is his future uncertain; even his present situation increases in difficulty.
(Said 2000: 52–3)
Just before Abul Khaizuran seals the three men in the tank as they
cross the border into Kuwait, he notes the time – half-past eleven – and
promises them their ordeal will take no more than ‘seven minutes at the
outside’ (Kanafani 1983: 49/133). In fact, because of the licentiousness
of the border guards, Abul Khaizuran cannot reopen the tank until
nine minutes to twelve. As he does so, he catches sight of his wrist
watch: ‘The round glass had cracked into little pieces’, an indication
of the futility of chronological clock time – and the normative political,
social and economic order it facilitates – as a panacea for Palestinian
suffering (Kanafani 1983: 53/141). In contrast, Kanafani’s durational
depiction of time provides a potential beacon for a people-to-come. That
Abul Khaizuran comes back to replace his own cracked wrist watch
with Marwan’s suggests that a durational conception of time does not
prevail. Nonetheless, Kanafani’s ‘de-chronologisation’ of time constructs
an untimely experiment for future actualisations (Baugh 2000: 52).
‘In great works, all moments of time are virtually present at once,
and can be actualised in infinite ways, in any order; this potentially
infinite becoming-actual thus constitutes a different order of time than
chronology or history’ (Baugh 2000: 52; see also Deleuze 1995: 152–3).
III. The Kanafani Effect

So far, I have focused primarily on the link between Kanafani’s literary
clinic and the Palestinians in Kuwait. But Kanafani’s literary diagnosis is
equally applicable to Kuwait itself – not just in relation to Palestinians
but in general. In fact, the two are inextricably bound. Kanafani’s
Kuwait stories provide a compelling diagnosis of the country’s current
political, social and economic stalemates, though there aren’t many
around who can hear what he had to say. Kanafani diagnoses Kuwait
in the 1950s as an inadequate long-term home for the majority
of immigrant Palestinians – despite its money and opportunities – for
the reasons discussed above. The percepts and affects Kanafani’s
stories extract – disappointment, entrapment, alienation, disjointedness,
avarice, suffocation, exclusion, classism and divisiveness, among many
others – undergirded the formation of the soon-to-be independent
nation-state, with implications for all its citizens and residents, not
only the Palestinians. Hidden in the interstices of Kuwait’s rising
modernity, in other words, were the components of the state’s potential
inadequacies. The percept of Kuwait-as-money traversed and continues
to traverse the country’s figuration of citizenship, its organisation of
political power, and its divisive social stratification.
The dichotomies around which Kuwaiti society is organised –
Kuwaiti/non-Kuwaiti, Arab/non-Arab, Muslim/non-Muslim – have
produced a politics of exclusion practised since at least the 1970s
(Longva 1997: 43–4). Anh Nga Longva argues that such processes
of exclusion were considered necessary by the state in order to
protect the ‘character of Kuwaiti society’ from the massive number
102 Mai Al-Nakib
of labour migrants in the country (Longva 1997: 44). I would add

that because Kuwaiti citizenship is primarily considered in terms of
benefits proffered to citizens, the distinction between those who have
a right to such privileges and those who do not becomes essential. It
was precisely at the time Kanafani was writing that Kuwaiti citizenship
was being constructed as a means through which to distribute oil
wealth and, simultaneously, if somewhat paradoxically, to restrict this
distribution. According to the 1959 Nationality Law, Kuwaitis included
only those men and their descendants established in Kuwait since 1920.
The children of Arab or Muslim fathers born in Kuwait could no
longer obtain citizenship, nor could Arabic speakers who had worked
and resided in the country for ten years, as both groups had been
able to do based on the 1948 law. Amendments to the Nationality
Law over the next few decades restricted citizenship opportunities
for most groups (though the government continued to nationalise
Bedouin in large numbers from the 1960s through the 1980s and
beyond in order to counterbalance perceived threats to their authority
from the liberal opposition). Today, the common assumption among
many, though certainly not all, Kuwaitis is that citizenship entails
a string of entitlements: free healthcare, education, housing, a job
for life, no taxes, financial and social benefits of various kinds, and
so on. Kuwaiti citizenship is generally not figured in terms of civic
responsibilities, productive contributions or innovative potential. This
inadequate understanding of citizenship constitutes non-Kuwaitis as
a threat to Kuwaiti bounty; therefore, as was the case with the
Palestinian community, they are not welcome to stay permanently.
However, this understanding does not consider how, without the
labour of these non-Kuwaitis, the production of Kuwaiti bounty would
likely diminish. Kanafani’s Kuwait stories excavate the roots of this
ongoing contradictory, circuitous logic through their creation of affects
of entrapment and exclusion, avarice and self-centeredness. Limiting
citizenship has done nothing to reduce the demographic imbalance
between Kuwaitis and non-Kuwaitis by discouraging migration, as may
have been hoped (Kuwait Central 2011: 43). Instead it has intensified
the oppositional logic structuring the category ‘Kuwaiti’ itself, a logic
responsible for many of the country’s ongoing crises.11
Despite Kanafani’s pessimistic diagnosis of Kuwait then and now,
his actual presence in Kuwait in the 1950s signified the possibility of
a better future than the one that has actualised. As a new and wealthy
nation-state, Kuwait could have positioned itself differently in relation
to those helping to bring about its modernisation (Palestinians among so
many other nationals), as well as in relation to the global economy (by

diversifying its productive capacities, for example). That Kanafani – an
outsider, a Palestinian – was widely published and respected in Kuwait
(even as he wrote stories critical of certain aspects of the country)
suggests a residual openness to diversity soon to disappear. This
openness would have been in keeping with Kuwait’s historical and
geographical position as a port town. It would also have been aligned
with ardent efforts in the 1950s and early 1960s to form Kuwait’s state
and civic institutions on democratic, humanist secular, and pan-Arabist
grounds. As Rosemarie Said Zahlan recounts:
The quest for political reform in Kuwait during the 1950s marked a new
departure. Its protagonists were no longer restricted to the merchant notables
who had been central to the Majlis movements of 1921 and 1938. They
now included some of the young educated men who had been abroad and
had remained abreast of events in the rest of the Arab world; they were
also stimulated by the presence in Kuwait of young, politically sophisticated
Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians and Iraqis, who were working there. [. . . ]
Political participation also became attractive to the newly formed labour
force, which included workers in the Kuwait Oil Company as well as those
engaged in construction and development projects. (Zahlan 1998: 41)
The political aspirations of these groups together with the strong support
of the Amir, Sheikh Abdullah al-Salim al-Sabah, would culminate in
the formation of the National Assembly in 1962. The tremendous
economic boom brought on by the export of oil beginning in 1946
made it possible for the government to establish an extensive welfare
state (redistributing oil wealth to the population); to finance major
construction and infrastructural development projects; and to introduce
a public education system which would enable Kuwait to ‘transition
from a largely illiterate to a literate society [. . . ] within a couple of
decades’ (Zahlan 1998: 40). As Zahlan notes, this period in the 1950s
was also when Kuwaitis were first exposed to events and ideologies in
the rest of the Arab world, including Nasserist pan-Arabism, the Suez
war in 1956, the revolution in Iraq in 1958 (and the establishment of a
republic there), among others (Zahlan 1998: 46–7).
A quick perusal of popular Kuwaiti magazines and newspapers from
the period provides a unique glimpse at the dynamic and progressive
sensibility of the time. The most well-respected Kuwaiti magazine,
al-‘Arabi, is a case in point. Founded by the Kuwait Ministry of
Information in 1958, al-‘Arabi appointed Egyptian scholar Ahmad Zaki
as its editor. One of its aims was to promote pan-Arabism through
104 Mai Al-Nakib
culture. Al-‘Arabi rightfully prided itself on its high intellectual standing

throughout the Arab region. Many of the magazine’s covers from the
1950s into the 1960s (including its first volume) featured photographs
of Arab women from various countries. A sample of article titles
from al-‘Arabi magazine in the late 1950s and early 1960s include
(author’s translations): ‘Cultural Exchanges between East and West’;
‘A Day with the Algerian Liberation Army’ (featuring photographs
of Algerian women soldiers); ‘We Want One Arab Nation Unaffected
by Political Changes’ (on pan-Arabism); ‘Islam Does Not Necessitate
the Hijab and Women are Permitted to Work’ (written by a Kuwaiti
mufti); ‘Policewomen’ (about Arab women in the police force); ‘On
Arab Nationalism’ (on the relevance of Arab nationalism and why
Arabs should free themselves of parochialism); ‘Machines Take the
Place of Man’ (about city planning and the role of machinery in a
rapidly developing Kuwait); ‘Borrowing Ideas in Arab Thought: All
Cultures Overlap’ (on the benefits of being open to unfamiliar ideas);
‘Jesus Christ as Depicted by Artists from Various Times’ (an illustrated
article that mentions how Muslim Arabs celebrate Christmas alongside
Christian Arabs); ‘Syrian Women Writers’; ‘Birth Control’ (an illustrated
medical explanation of how it works); ‘Kuwaiti High School Students’
(an article with photographs of young Kuwaiti girls at school conducting
experiments in science labs, playing music, throwing a basketball, and
posing happily for the camera). Other magazines from the same period
and earlier (late 1940s and early 1950s), including al-Ra’id, published
by the Kuwait Teacher’s Club, and al-Eman, published by the Arab
Nationalist Culture Club, cover similar topics. The more politically left
weekly newspaper, al-Taleea, established in 1962 by Kuwaiti political
activist and ANM founding member Ahmad al-Khatib, focused on pan-
Arabism, leftism, the Palestine issue, local politics and women’s rights,
among other topical concerns. Ghassan Kanafani, al-Khatib’s friend,
sometimes published in al-Taleea, where Palestinian political cartoonist
Nagi al-Ali worked for a time (al-Ali also published his political cartoons
in the Kuwaiti newspapers al-Siyasa and al-Qabas).
In contrast to the 1950s, Kanafani is hardly remembered today
as a part of Kuwait’s (not just Palestine’s) literary and cultural
heritage. His work is not taught in high schools and his books are
difficult to find. Forgetting Kanafani and his legacy is, I would argue,
symptomatic of a wider cultural, political, economic and social ‘amnesia’
responsible for the tendency toward monoculturalism in Kuwait today
(Huyssen 1995: 1). Many in Kuwait have forgotten the early potential
of their nation-state as a genuinely cosmopolitan and progressive
place, decipherable in the 1950s and early 1960s not only in its
magazines and newspapers but through its multicultural population, its
canny modernising strategies, its infrastructural projects, its potentially
egalitarian political institutions, its emphasis on and socialisation of
healthcare and education, and so on. This amnesia confirms the percepts
of Kuwait extracted by Kanafani’s stories discussed above and reveals
that, unfortunately, Kanafani’s diagnosis went unheeded. As Baugh
points out, ‘a work may work for a reader at some times and not others,
and whether and how a work works depends on the forces and resources
the reader brings to the encounter’ (Baugh 2000: 53). Kanafani’s early
fabulations of Kuwait invented a people missing at the time: on the one
hand, a community of Kuwaitis able to perceive those residing within
their borders – Palestinians among others – as potential Kuwaitis and, on
the other, a community of Palestinians able to perceive Kuwait – despite
its wealth and promise – as problematic in the future precisely because of
these missing Kuwaitis. Kanafani’s fabulations diagnose the aftermath
of the Iraqi invasion on the Palestinian community in Kuwait. The
aftermath of the invasion, in turn, helps diagnose the ostensibly
unrelated sectarianism and political divisions currently on the rise within
the country. The adverse effects of both are related, I would argue, to
the dichotomising theorisation and exclusionary practice of citizenship
in Kuwait.12
Remembering Kanafani and his legacy – what Barbara Harlow calls
a revolutionary writer’s ‘after life’ – can provide a more critically astute
sense of the present than currently prevails (Harlow 1996: 7). While
this understanding will not likely transform the present or, for that
matter, redeem the past, the act of ‘cultural recall’ itself may help prepare
the conditions for a more ethical and flexible future (Bal 1999: vii).
There are small signs that such a process may, in fact, be underway.13
A recent art show sponsored by a governmental organisation, the
Kuwait National Council for Culture, Arts, and Letters, and produced
by the privately owned MinRASY Projects engaged the question of
memory and forgetting in relation to the missing Palestinian community
in Kuwait. The compelling two-part show (comprised of Museum of
Manufactured Response to Absence, featuring artworks by over twenty
different artists, and Unplified by Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui)
was installed at Kuwait’s Museum of Modern Art in May 2012. As
mentioned in the exhibition notes, Unplified, a sound installation piece,
was inspired by Kanafani’s Men in the Sun. The work was installed in
two connected, unairconditioned, blindingly white portable cabins on
the museum grounds. The first room contained an audio and visual
106 Mai Al-Nakib
recording of desert sounds amplified by Atoui’s feedback system. He

recorded these sounds and images on a trip he took in a water tank
through the desert from Basra to Kuwait, following the journey of Abu
Qais, Assad and Marwan. The second room contained another feedback
system amplifying the listener’s presence in the space. The suffocating
heat of the cabins, the disturbingly bright light and the eeriness of
the ambient sound, force visitors into an uncomfortable zone and they
are suddenly made to confront what many may never have had to
experience before. Unplified constructs the desert as percept, making it
stand up on its own as sensation. It constructs paralysis and futility as
affects – both through the overwhelming heat and brightness of the piece
and its inescapable, impenetrable sound. It responds to Abul Khaizuran’s
famous lament at the end of Men in the Sun:
‘Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you say anything?
Why?’
The desert suddenly began to send back the echo:
‘Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you bang the
sides of the tank? Why? Why? Why?’ (Kanafani 1983: 56/152)
The men may have knocked on the sides of the tank, but their knocking
would have been swallowed up by the desert, in much the same
way that Kanafani’s own diagnosis of Kuwait has been swallowed up
and forgotten. By forcing especially Kuwaiti visitors to listen to the
experience of the men in the sun – that is to say, the missing Palestinians
and their forgotten legacy – Unplified echoes back across the desert the
long overlooked potential of Kanafani’s early diagnosis of Kuwait. It is
too late for the vibrant community of Palestinians that existed in Kuwait
before 1991. But it may yet be possible for the Kanafani effect to make
a difference to Kuwait.
Notes
1. In all references from Kanafani’s texts, the first page refers to the English
translations, the second to the original Arabic texts. All Arabic references from
Men in the Sun are from Kanafani (1999), while all Arabic references from the
short stories are from Kanafani (1987).
2. I would like to acknowledge that this work was supported by Kuwait University
Research Grant No. AE03/12.
3. According to Deleuze, ‘Maps should not be understood only in extension, in
relation to a space constituted by trajectories. There are also maps of intensity,
of density, that are concerned with what fills space, what subtends the trajectory’
(Deleuze 1997: 64). The clinical cartography I chart here in relation to Kanafani
is, thus, a ‘list or constellation of affects, an intensive map’; in other words,
a becoming (Deleuze 1997: 64). But, as Deleuze explains, art’s intensive map
(a map of virtualities) ‘is superimposed onto the real map, whose distances
[parcours] it transforms’ (Deleuze 1997: 67). This is the actualisation of virtual
literary effects, the clinical practice of literature.
4. Reading literature for effects rather than for meaning shifts the critical process
from the exegetical to the practical. The Kanafani effect (Kanafani’s literary
construction of singular affects and percepts) is not reducible to any single
feature or outcome, or to Kanafani as author or subject. The Kanafani effect
(as non-personal extraction) can combine with various bodies (organic, social,
political and philosophical, among others) as a machine, producing a range
of unpredictable new modes of life (even more effects) (Deleuze 2000: 153).
Deleuze states, ‘All these things have proper names, but the proper name does
not designate a person or a subject. It designates an effect, a zigzag, something
which passes or happens between two as though under a potential difference: the
“Compton effect”, the “Kelvin effect”’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 6; see also,
Deleuze 2000: 164–5). For a discussion of the link between the singular author
and the people to come, see Tynan 2012: 153–72.
5. As Barbara Harlow points out, Kanafani was the first to apply the term
‘resistance’ (muqawama) to Palestinian Literature in 1966 in his study Adab
al-Muqawama fi Filastin al-Muhtela: 1948–1966 (Literature of Resistance in
Occupied Palestine: 1948–1966) (Kanafani 1982; Harlow 1987: 2). His own
literary output is most often considered as national or resistance literature
and in terms of its political implications (Abbas 1972; al-Mansur 1972:
205, 217–21; Siddiq 1984; Harlow 1987: 2–4, 86–92, 196–76; Coffin 1996;
Harlow 1996: 45–75; al-Naqib 1999; Hamdi 2011; among many others). While
Kanafani acknowledged that his writing dealt specifically with Palestinian issues,
he regarded his work as expressing wider human concerns, ultimately not
reducible to Palestine or to Palestinians alone (Kanafani 1974: 138; Meyer 2001:
26–7).
6. Kanafani’s friend Fadl al-Naqib argues that artists and intellectuals of resistance
(including Kanafani, Nagi al-Ali, and others) have the special capacity to detect
future danger before the majority do (al-Naqib 1999: 208). He states, ‘Ghassan
Kanafani’s greatness was his ability to predict early on the major setbacks to
nationalism by observing the faults of ordinary individuals in everyday life’
(author’s translation) (al-Naqib 1999: 210). Al-Naqib goes on to illustrate
how Kanafani’s textual ‘after life’ (to use Barbara Harlow’s term) continues to
produce effects on the lives of Palestinians (Harlow 1996: 7; al-Naqib 1999:
214–16). My study considers whether the Kanafani effect can be actualised in
Kuwait.
7. For an analysis of the figure of oil in Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, see McLarney
(2009: 177–89).
8. Deleuze similarly describes the holes or gaps in people’s lives as the places
where ‘movement takes place’; that is, places where some kind of realisation
or transformation occurs (Deleuze 1995: 138). The narrator’s time in hospital
constitutes such a hole and through it he transmutes conventional, hierarchising
understandings of identity.
9. Sectarian divisions between Sunni and Shi‘a Muslims in Kuwait are based less on
religious differences than on political affiliations. The Shi‘a minority (about 30
per cent of the Kuwaiti population) generally supports the government, while a
substantial portion of the tribal Sunni majority (between 50 to 60 per cent of the
Kuwaiti population) has more recently constituted itself as part of the opposition
to government policies. It should be kept in mind that historically the latter
group was more aligned with government causes; however, the recent boycott
of the December 2012 election by the opposition demonstrates this support can
108 Mai Al-Nakib
no longer be counted on by the government. For a succinct discussion of the

December 2012 election in Kuwait, see al-Sumait (2012). The ongoing uprising
in Bahrain has intensified mistrust between Sunni and Shi‘a groups in Kuwait.
These tensions are further exacerbated by the regional polarity between Saudi
Arabia and Iran. For more on sectarian divisions in the Gulf, including Kuwait,
see Chatham House (2012). Additional political and identic divisions include:
Islamist (itself a highly segmented category including Salafi extremists, members
of Hadas or the Kuwaiti Muslim Brothers, and Shi‘i Islamists); liberals (including
secularists, old-school Arab nationalists, and women’s rights activists, among
others); elite merchant families (mainly Sunni); Bedouin; bidoun (those without
citizenship); and non-Kuwaitis (another highly segmented group ranging from
wealthy bankers to low-wage Bangladeshi street cleaners and female domestic
labour).
10. For a brief analysis of Kanfani’s use of multiple narration in his novella Ma
Tabaqqa Lakum (All That’s Left to You), see Meyer 2001: 29–34; also see
Azouqa 2000: 169–70.
11. It goes beyond the scope of this paper to detail these varied and shifting
crises at length. They range from vocal political opposition to the status
quo; to economic concerns about the country’s long-term ability to pay out
the salaries and benefits of government employees (comprising 75 per cent
of employed Kuwaitis) (Kanafani 2012); to intensifying sectarian and social
divisions mentioned above. Suffice it to say, an exclusive and exclusionary
notion of citizenship (based on access to cradle-to-grave welfare state
benefits) does little to develop the kind of civic responsibility and acceptance
of heterogeneity needed to ensure lasting economic, political and social
stability.
12. Kanafani describes the rigid images of thought that prevent genuinely democratic
practices from unfolding as ‘blind language’ or ‘incantatory thought’ (al-fikr
al-ghina’i) (Kanafani 1990: 145–6). One way out of the trap of blind language
is to embrace or encourage what he calls the ‘blood circulation system’
(al-dawra al-damawiyya), a concept Harlow links to Said’s notion of ‘affiliation’
(Harlow 1990: 134). Affiliation, unlike genealogical and hereditary filiation,
requires critical attention, effort and assessment. It is a worldly practice, not
a transcendent or biological given. According to Said, worldly critical practice
within affiliative cultural communities is ‘life-enhancing and constitutively
opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals
are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom’ (Said
1983: 29). Kanafani similarly describes democracy as ‘that circulation of blood,
healthy and reinvigorating, that must reach every part and member of the
social body’ (Kanafani 1990: 151). Both Said’s and Kanafani’s understandings
of health (as affiliative cultural and critical practice) correspond to Deleuze’s
Nietzschean notion of literature as an enterprise of health discussed above
(Deleuze 1997: 3); on Deleuze and Guattari’s similar understanding of ‘alliance’
(as opposed to filiation) and what it can do socially and politically, see Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 241, 246–8.
13. Officially, at the state level, relations between the governments of Palestine
and Kuwait are on track once again, culminating in the recent opening of
the Embassy of Palestine in Kuwait in 2013. My focus, however, is more on
unofficial memory than on official government action (commendable though it
is). The two are no doubt linked, and as the government continues its support of
Palestine, this may affect the attitudes, sensibilities and memories of the general
public with regard to the history of Palestinians in Kuwait (although there are
no guarantees).
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Arendt and Deleuze on Totalitarianism
and the Revolutionary Event: Among the
Peoples of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
James Phillips The University of New South Wales
Abstract
Gilles Deleuze and Hannah Arendt are two thinkers who have theorised
the exceptionalism of the revolutionary moment. For Deleuze, it is the
moment of the people to come. For Arendt, it is the moment of the
freedom of political action. In the decades since the fall of the Berlin
Wall there has been extensive debate on how to remember the German
Democratic Republic (DDR) and how to understand the events leading
up to its demise. Arendt’s analyses of totalitarianism, natality and the
public sphere provide points of orientation in an attempt to clarify the
nature of the DDR, the dishonesty of its evaluation in the West as well as
the transitory purchase of its legitimating discourse on later generations
of its citizens. Deleuze’s reinvigoration of the revolutionary sense of
the term ‘people’ sets it in defiance of prevalent notions of popular
sovereignty and therefore facilitates a different reading of the protests
against the so-called people’s republic of the DDR: something else was
at issue besides the substitution of one state form for another.
Keywords: People, East Germany, totalitarianism, natality, democracy,

sovereignty
The people ought to fight on behalf of the law no less than in defence of the
wall.
Heraclitus, Diels and Kranz 1985: B44

DOI: 10.3366/dls.2015.0176
Arendt and Deleuze on the Peoples of Revolution 113
I. What Makes a People?

A slogan that, as is well known, appeared on placards during the protests
in the dying months of the East German Government read: ‘Wir sind das
Volk’ (‘We are the people’). As a simple declarative utterance, it might
seem to have little to do with the rethinking of the concept of the people
that Deleuze undertakes in his works. In its assertion of identity it does
not sit comfortably with Deleuze’s negative assessment of the politics of
consciousness in Cinema 2: The Time Image:
The death-knell for becoming conscious was precisely the consciousness that
there were no people, but always several peoples, an infinity of peoples, who
remained to be united, or should not be united, in order for the problem to
change. It is in this way that third world cinema is a cinema of minorities,
because the people only exist in the condition of minority, which is why they
are missing. (Deleuze 1991: 220)
The first person plural of the statement ‘Wir sind das Volk’ is,
however, an articulation not so much of unity as of disunity. The anti-
government provocation of the placards is that they affirm a contest
among claims to the title of ‘people’. The regime, which had for decades
presented itself as the instrument of popular sovereignty, was now being
challenged to acknowledge the speciousness of its self-presentation. The
placards parodied the collective utterances of the East German state,
impugning their right to speak on behalf of the populace. That the
placards did not explicitly read ‘We are the people, not you’ is of course
insufficient to save the notional unity of popular sovereignty: the people
that mythically came to power in the bourgeois and Marxist revolutions
of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries could no longer be expected to
rally together. As a counter-assertion in the age of popular sovereignty,
the insurrectionist slogan ‘We are the people’ attests that the people
is missing. This moment in recent European history, which has been
so zealously commandeered for the narrative of nationalism and the
vindication of capitalism, calls out for a different reading.
In what way was 1989 a revolutionary event? Both Deleuze and
Arendt caution against the condemnation of revolutions on the basis
of whatever bloodstained aftermaths they chance to have.1 Needless
to say, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the assimilation of the old East
Germany into the Federal Republic do not compare with the revolutions
of 1789 and 1917 and the ferocity of the Jacobin Reign of Terror and
the Stalinist purges. But the caution relevant to a potentially censorious
interpretation of 1989 is that the uprisings should likewise not be
114 James Phillips
condemned on the basis of the fizzling out of popular enthusiasm in the

face of the expansion of the West’s market economy. The slogan ‘We
are the people’ does not have to be taken as an early vote of confidence
in the German nation state that a year later proclaimed itself ‘reunified’.
In its immediate polemical context the slogan alleges a fissuring in the
popular sovereignty that legitimates the modern European state. It calls
the East German Government’s legitimacy into question by disputing its
oneness with the people. As a slogan in protests against a regime already
claiming to rest on popular sovereignty, ‘We are the people’ clearly
cannot have the same significance as the exordium ‘We, the people,
. . . ’ with which the framers of democratic constitutions broadcast their
difference from a monarchical or aristocratic past. Insofar as it throws
doubt on the regime’s discourse of popular sovereignty, the slogan hints
at a minoritarian politics at work in the events of 1989. And yet insofar
as it presses a claim of its own to the identity of the people and, by
inference, to the sovereignty invested in it, the slogan perpetuates the
discourse of popular sovereignty and confesses its political supremacy.
On the one hand, the protests throughout East Germany rejected the idea
of a symbiosis between the centralised government and the supposedly
unitary population, opening the doors instead to the prospect of ‘an
infinity of peoples’ and a disabling of the nation state. On the other
hand, if judged in the light of subsequent developments, the protests did
not extend beyond a reform of the state – the objective was a return to
the foundational moment when the people itself makes its voice heard
and the state is reorganised accordingly.
For Deleuze, in his recasting of the long-standing link between the
notions of ‘revolution’ and ‘people’, a people does not exist outside of
the revolutionary rupture of history: the slogan ‘We are the people’ is
Deleuzian to the extent that it disavows the state, but not otherwise.
Deleuze’s ‘people’ does not possess a biology and history to which
the revolutionary moment would be a passing qualification. Revolution
becomes the essence of the people. The people do not come to power
in the revolution with the seizure of the state apparatus; it first comes
into being in the revolutionary event and disappears with the end of the
revolution when the state apparatus restores its authority. In Deleuze’s
conception, the people is irremediably minor, a bastard race. More
precisely, this is the conception of the people when viewed from the
extrinsic perspective of the state. Yet the people that is outside the state
and that the state views as alien to itself, as material to be manipulated or
resistance to be quashed, admits of another definition besides the state’s.
The people, as Deleuze also contends, is ‘a possibility of life’ (Deleuze
1997: 4). The people’s incapacity to rule, which in reactionary circles

has forever been a matter of the poor’s short-sightedness and lack of
education, is attributable with Deleuze to the openness of becoming in
the revolutionary moment when rule itself is in question and not just
the identities of who is to rule whom. The people, in this sense, is the
invalidation of popular sovereignty and the systems of rule erected on it.
And in this sense, the people is necessarily always missing in the age of
popular sovereignty.
Etienne Tassin is one commentator who has called for a rereading
of Arendt’s and Deleuze’s analyses of political action with a view to
their convergences. That the two thinkers can be played off against
each other, with Arendt as the life-long advocate of judgement pitted
against Deleuze as its critic, can lead to an underestimation of what
they share. Daniel W. Smith notes the eccentricity with which Deleuze,
among French philosophers of his generation, declined to enter on the
path of the problem of judgement and thereby to appropriate Arendt’s
legacy (Smith 2003: 315). For Tassin, what Deleuze discusses in terms
of the pre-individual processes of subjectivation bears comparison with
Arendt’s account of the collective production of the political actor’s
singularity (Tassin 2012: 49). Both thinkers invest the revolutionary
moment with a theoretical privilege, since for both the flux that
characterises this moment is the properly primary political phenomenon.
From the vantage point that acknowledges the existence solely of
the actual, the reified and the sedimented, Deleuze’s processes of
subjectivation and Arendt’s acting in concert are at risk of being received
as euphemisms for absence. Yet that, for Deleuze, the people is missing
can be taken to indicate, in an Arendtian register, that acting in concert
still exceeds the determination of identity.
Deleuze frequently cites Paul Klee’s 1924 lecture at the Kunstverein
in Jena as a precedent for his thesis that the people is missing, and
in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari go so far as to credit
Germany – more specifically, the politically fractured Germany of the
romantic period – with a genius for not finding the people in its midst
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 375). Yet Klee does not write that the
people is missing (Deleuze’s ‘le peuple manque’); instead, what he writes
is that ‘Uns trägt kein Volk’ (‘No people supports us’) (Klee 1956: 95),
which in the French and English translations is rendered respectively ‘Il
nous manque cette dernière force. Faute d’un peuple qui nous porte’
(Klee 1964: 33) and ‘We still lack the ultimate power, for: the people is
not with us’ (Klee 1948: 55). Deleuze and Guattari themselves quote the
passage at issue in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2004:
116 James Phillips
372). Yet if the tag ‘le peuple manque’ transgresses the norms of what
constitutes a paraphrase, does Deleuze’s proposition that the people
is missing need a precedent? Perhaps the citation of Klee has thrown
readers off the scent of another thinker with whom Deleuze’s thesis can
be argued to be in dialogue.
For Deleuze, the people is not a given or even a programme, but rather
as the revolutionary event they irrupt into the temporal continuum: it
is the moment that Benjamin, in a complementary discourse, calls the
‘leap in the open air of history’ (Benjamin 2003: 395). For Arendt,
comparably, the fact of human plurality escapes us in its proper
dimension until the revolutionary moment that sees us entering upon
the freedom of acting in concert. Both Deleuze and Arendt politicise
the disruption of historical necessity that in Kant is a feature of the
moral act and that, earlier still, in Catholicism was a characteristic of the
miracle. Deleuze speaks of the uncanny where Arendt invokes freedom.
Neither subscribes to a discrete substantialisation of what irrupts into
history – it is not another world (the Kantian transcendental self or
divine intervention) that appears to intrude upon this one so much as
an exception that this world uncovers within its own regularity. Without
another world as its Kantian or divine guarantor, the revolutionary event
cannot be taken for granted in defiance of its historical unpredictability
and fortuitousness. It is not written into the structure of Arendt’s and
Deleuze’s worlds that a revolution will come about. A corollary of this
is that the sense of a revolutionary moment cannot be extrapolated from
what has preceded it, from what has attained the status of a norm. Ready
answers to the question ‘What is happening?’ that seek to write the event
back into the continuum of history fail to do justice to the event. These
answers, which were quick to propose themselves in the aftermath of
the fall of the Wall, crowd out the openness of sense itself, that exposure
of sense which has been a recurring concern for Jean-Luc Nancy no less
than for Deleuze.
For Deleuze, the political paradigmaticity of the events in France in
May 1968 is, so to speak, their non-paradigmaticity. No pre-existing
agenda was actioned and no new constitution issued from a popular
assembly: as a result, the becoming of the revolutionary moment – or, as
Arendt puts it, its freedom – was all the more manifest. In this regard,
the protests in East Germany in 1989 achieved both too much and
too little. They successfully toppled a regime that had proved itself
in the past not averse to violent crackdowns, while they also failed
to affect in any fundamental sense the course that Bonn set for the
integration of the old East Germany into the Federal Republic: the
success disguised the failure. If the events of 1989 have not attracted the
theoretical engagement from the Left that May 1968 has inspired, this
is largely because of the outcome in which, like a grotesque inversion
of the Marxist model, communism (however nominal) was overthrown
in favour of capitalism (however modulated by liberal democratic
institutions). But the outcome, as Arendt and Deleuze stress, is not
the event itself. By means of an inevitably potted history of the DDR,
a tracing of the lineaments of the people missing within a so-called
people’s republic might furnish the makings of an alternative to both
totalitarianism and capitalism. To take a first step toward ascertaining
how the people of the slogan ‘Wir sind das Volk’ might function as a
polemical concept, it is necessary to sketch the uses to which the East
German Government put the term ‘Volk’.
II. East Germany: Popular Legitimacy in the

Wake of Totalitarianism
The DDR was an anomaly. It was both the semblance of a state
and the most conspicuous and obtrusive of states. On the one hand,
it was a country whose claim to exist was taken in West Germany
with a grain of salt – the largest German-language newspaper, the
reactionary Bild-Zeitung, could never bring itself to refer to the DDR
in other than scare quotes and no government in Bonn was willing
to turn its back on refugees by acknowledging that the citizens of the
DDR were the citizens of a separate state. On the other hand, the
ruling Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) assembled and
entrenched an apparatus of surveillance and control that outstripped, in
the level of participation and accumulated data, the totalitarian police
states of Hitler and Stalin. Half soap bubble and half steel trap, the
DDR does not fit neatly into the pre-existing categories of political
science. The regime’s attempts at self-definition are of little help here.
Coming into being in the aftermath of National Socialism, the DDR
called itself a people’s republic and set about rehabilitating the German
word ‘Volk’. The Volk, in the sense of the proletariat, was to provide
the basis of the new government’s legitimacy. Even if the SED had
truly been a government for and of the people of the proletariat, its
legitimating myth would still have been open to dispute on account of
the polysemy of the word ‘Volk’. The Federal Republic (BRD) to the
West, keeping alive an understanding of ‘Volk’ from several centuries
of nation states, postured more convincingly as the government of all
Germans (this seeming Pan-Germanism in Bonn nevertheless pressed no
118 James Phillips
title to Austria, let alone to German-speaking Switzerland). The BRD

made provokingly clear its support for popular uprisings in the DDR:
in memory of the crushed 1953 insurrection it established 17 June as
a national holiday and likewise gave the date as the new name to the
western continuation of the boulevard Unter den Linden in Berlin. In
comparison with other communist parties in Eastern Europe, the SED
faced greater obstacles in reinventing itself as a nationalist party after
the disintegration of the Soviet bloc. The DDR was a people’s republic
that had not been created by a free and open public process, that did not
ground its authority in or over a discrete ethnic community, and that,
as it was neither populist nor paternalist, pursued steadily neither the
short-term nor long-term interests of the populace. It was a legitimation
crisis held in check by foreign military force. In one respect, the DDR
was a republic in search of a people: in 1961, after 2.7 million of its
citizens had already left for West Germany, it threw up the wall in order
to make for itself a people, a people who could no longer get away.
This image of the DDR is a caricature. Even if the DDR is of course
not the only regime and period to have been the subject of caricature,
scholarly debate over the last two decades has been prompted by the
case of the DDR to dwell on the question of the status of caricature in
historiography. It is as though this is the lesson that historians of East
Germany hope to draw for the discipline as a whole. History, as an
academic discipline, cannot get by without caricature because history,
as the vast assemblage of collective and individual experiences, always
overtaxes the representational capacities of history as an academic
discipline. Caricatures invite corrections – Leander Haußmann’s films,
Sonnenallee (1999) and NVA (2005), are two such products of a recent
culture of rehabilitation of the DDR, which in their turn are caricatures.
They are caricatures inasmuch as they are viewed metonymically,
for these films’ pockets of everyday happiness cannot stand in for a
representation of the reality of the regime as a whole. Yet a dogmatic
distinction between the public and the private – and Hannah Arendt is
a late and doctrinaire advocate of this distinction – decides in advance
against the political relevance of these films and secures the historian
an object of study of manageable complexity. The distinction, however,
cannot pretend to stand up under criticism and, indeed, in Arendt
its function is arguably prescriptive rather than descriptive: what she
questions is not the fact of the influence of the social on the political
so much as the desirability of this influence. A historian’s equivalent
of the map in Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘On Exactitude in Science’, which
is of the same size as the empire it charts, is unthinkable. The justice
of a caricature, given that it is necessarily unjust to the full depth

and diversity of the lived experiences of history, is relative to other
caricatures, but assessing it is also complicated by the less quantitative
requirements of justice to the murdered and tortured. To stick with film
as a medium of representations of history, it is easy enough to spot
the exaggerations of Nazi oppression in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
The Sound of Music (1965) or Luchino Visconti’s La Caduta degli dei
(1969), but the claim that on certain issues ‘the Nazis weren’t that bad
(that early)’ can quickly seem, in certain contexts, apologetic rather than
corrective. The work of mourning, however, can be hijacked and made
to serve multiple ends.
Was the DDR a totalitarian regime? What is the range of the term
‘totalitarian’? Does Deleuze’s way of understanding the term lend itself
to being applied to the DDR? Deploring its continued invocation
with regard to East Germany, Mary Fullbrook has pronounced the
totalitarianism model ‘a fairly dead horse’ (Fullbrook 2006: 609).
In June 2006, similarly uneasy with a one-sided preoccupation with
the machinery of power, a panel of historians appointed by the
German Federal Government to assess historical representations of
the SED dictatorship (die Expertenkommission zur Schaffung eines
Geschichtsverbundes ‘Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur’) called for more
investigations of everyday life in East Germany.2 The multitudinous
lifeworlds of the inhabitants of the DDR simply cannot be descriptively
captured by the top-down schema of totalitarianism. Arendt would
never have disputed this, and the usefulness of her thought to
current debates over how to approach the history of the DDR,
even as other theorists of totalitarianism are discredited, should not
be underestimated. A point of communication between Arendt and
phenomenology is the constitutive openness of collective existence that
she valorises in expounding her concept of natality. Breaking with
totalitarianism as a historiographical tool can be seen as an elaboration
rather than rejection of Arendt’s position, for the writing of irreducibly
plural histories takes up on a historiographical plane the struggle
she believed had to be fought against the homogenising narratives
of totalitarian movements (it is a similar struggle that, according
to On Revolution, not only the nineteenth-century chroniclers, but
even the actors of the French Revolution neglected – with disastrous
consequences – when they interpreted history as the unfolding of
impersonal forces). What Arendt had striven to depict in the polemic and
prognosis of The Origins of Totalitarianism was reality as it appeared
from within these movements – an irreality in the process of coming into
120 James Phillips
being.3 Arendt was aware, according to Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, of a

perspectival convergence between totalitarianism and unitary history:
Totalitarian rule and the ideological constructions of history that kept it
in motion (but also the planning and feasibility ideology of the Western
social sciences) sought to annul the concrete, reality-based experiences upon
which the tradition of political theory had been grounded since antiquity.
(Hoffmann 2010: 233
Arendt’s attempted rehabilitation of the experience of ancient politics

is more than simply complementary to her critique of totalitarianism.
The terror of the twentieth century, which marks the consummate
oblivion of the experience of the freedom of human plurality, calls for
this rehabilitation as a corrective. For Arendt, ‘totalitarianism’ is not a
concept to be added complacently to the historian’s inventory, just as
the phenomena she discusses in connection with totalitarianism were
not inevitable developments of the ‘laws’ of history.4 For Deleuze and
Guattari, who, in contrast to Arendt but following Virilio, decline to
call National Socialism totalitarian on account of its suicidal character,
‘totalitarianism’ refers to the conservative modes of operation of a
state in response to the lines of flight that escape it (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 254). For Arendt as well as for Deleuze and Guattari,
‘totalitarianism’ describes the objective rather than the reality of a
regime.5 Arendt’s ‘plurality’ and Deleuze’s ‘people’ are nonetheless
themselves not a given of this more variegated reality. A spark is needed,
an inrushing of the untimely.
In the 1950s Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski were
less circumspect in differentiating between a regime’s wishful thinking
and the vectors of uncontrollable forces in which it finds itself. They put
forward six criteria for recognising a totalitarian dictatorship: a steering
ideology, a single mass party, an apparatus of terror, a monopoly of
the means of communication, a weapons monopoly and a state-run
economy (Friedrich and Brzezinski 1965: 22). Of the six criteria those
of a mass party, a terror apparatus and a centrally controlled economy
present fewer methodological difficulties, even if their application is still
problematic. But concerning the other three, the meaning of ‘ideology’
is too contested for it to function straightforwardly as a distinguishing
characteristic, and to identify a totalitarian dictatorship by a weapons
monopoly is to make light of the ingenuity and resourcefulness with
which human beings, even in isolation, can transform ostensibly
innocuous materials into missiles, explosives, and the like. Friedrich
and Brzezinski’s remaining criterion – control of the outlets of mass
communication – does not apply in the case of the DDR, where much of
the country had access to West German TV and radio: an ideological
consistency of the nation cannot be inferred from the ideological
consistency of the SED, just as free speech conversely cannot be identified
with the intrusion of foreign media voices.
Hannah Arendt, in a response to a paper on totalitarianism that
Friedrich delivered at a conference in 1953, took issue with Friedrich’s
failure to register what for her was the defining destructiveness of
totalitarianism.6 In Arendt’s conception, the novelty of the regimes of
Hitler and Stalin is that the causa finalis of these regimes was death.
Murder has ceased to be a means to an end, such as the maintenance
in power of a despot or tyrant, and has become the ratio essendi – no
one is to be spared. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt suggests
that totalitarianism requires a single suicidal regime in control of the
entire planet. The concentration camps are experiments, miniatures of
the world that would exist under such a regime (Arendt 1967: 458).
What Arendt can thus be said to glimpse in the dictatorships of Hitler
and Stalin is not the reality of totalitarianism, which would be the
extinction of the human race, but its possibility. Arendt’s examination
of totalitarianism endeavours to hold on to the radical newness of
this possibility and threat. As Martin Sabrow notes, Arendt’s theory
of totalitarianism, unlike Friedrich und Brzezinski’s, is not an attempt
at description (Sabrow 1998: 54). It is a warning – its verification as a
description would be also its invalidation, on an earth where there is no
one for whom any sentence whatsoever could be true.
Under totalitarianism the line of engagement with which the old forces
of reaction and revolution were familiar loses its pertinence, and the facts
of the matter, rather than scarecrows decked with the trappings of past
conflicts, need to be faced. Friedrich and Brzezinski’s schema is not alone
in writing totalitarianism back into the continuum of European history,
as though the oprichniki under Ivan the Terrible return in twentieth-
century guise as the KGB or the party of the Medici is a meaningful
precursor of the one-party rule of totalitarian dictatorships. In Roberto
Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (1945), a film whose realist credentials lie
elsewhere, the novelty of Nazism is not grasped, for at a time when the
liberation of the camps did not result in freedom for their homosexual
prisoners, the danger posed by two officers of the Gestapo is translated
into the more familiar danger believed posed by a homosexual and
a lesbian. Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones (first published
in French as Les Bienveillantes in 2006), in which the protagonist
is an officer in the SS as well as a homosexual, is recent evidence
122 James Phillips
of the vitality of this particular conflation in the Western imaginary.

And in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), in
a throwback to perceptions from the American War of Independence,
the communist sleeper agent, for reasons of readable menace rather
than background, speaks with an English accent. If in these instances
totalitarianism is not seen for what it is, Arendt is also cautious not
to classify as totalitarian regimes that, for all their repressiveness and
systematic brutality, do not exhibit the open-ended murderousness by
which Hitler’s and Stalin’s dictatorships distinguished themselves in
her view.7 In her 1975 text ‘Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address’
she considers Khrushchev’s ascendancy to power and the 20th Party
Congress as marking the transition from totalitarianism, with its millions
of completely innocent victims, to a tyrannical regime that persecuted
chiefly the opposition (Arendt 1975: 4). Yet she was in two minds
with regard to Khrushchev. In ‘Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections
on the Hungarian Revolution’, appended to the second edition of
The Origins of Totalitarianism although subsequently retracted, she
portrays Khrushchev as a continuation of totalitarianism because he
was willing to contemplate nuclear annihilation (Arendt 1958b: 492).8
That such absolute recklessness is not her sole criterion for classifying
a regime as totalitarian is apparent from her omitting to call the
United States totalitarian, notwithstanding the insane bravado of its own
nuclear stance. The DDR, as a country without a nuclear arsenal at
its command and without a record of genocide, that in its hunger for
hard currency even sold dissidents to West Germany instead of killing
or incarcerating them, cannot accordingly be labelled totalitarian in
Arendt’s sense – murder was not its byword. This restriction of the term
can be inferred confidently from Arendt’s writings. In her Introduction
to the revised edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, directly before
reflecting on East Germany’s incorporation into the satellite system of
the Soviet Union, she asserts that totalitarianism ‘came no less to an end
in Russia with the death of Stalin’ than it did in Germany with the death
of Hitler (Arendt 1967: xxi). Needless to say, this does not exculpate the
SED: to deny that the East German regime was genocidal is not of itself
to invite Ostalgie.
By abolishing the distinction between the public and the private, by
letting nothing stand as politically irrelevant, the SED yet displayed one
of the traits by which Arendt believed totalitarianism was recognisable:
Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without
destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating
men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of

government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys
private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not
belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate
experiences of man. (Arendt 1967: 475)
The disregard of privacy, as it is not coupled with mass murder, is

not enough in itself, however, to distance the DDR from contemporary
Western democracies, where the police command much more finely
nuanced profiles of the private lives of citizens, via internet browser
histories and CCTV, than their technologically neophyte East German
counterparts. The smirking triumphalism in the West, to which Ostalgie
is in part a defensive but justifiably impatient riposte, is too quick to
expatriate the phenomenon of the police state.
What in the Italy of the 1920s were features of the self-described
totalitarian state are, from Arendt’s later vantage point, merely
anticipations of the full horror of Nazism and Stalinism. The integration
and coordination of social groups, government agencies, formerly
autonomous institutions, and so on, which first stood as indices of
a totalitarian regime, paled in significance before the revelation of
the different order of totality to which Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes
appeared headed. A political totality, insofar as it has safeguarded itself
against encroachments, fragmentations, unassimilable perspectives and
unmeetable demands, in short, insofar as it has rendered itself apolitical,
is the reign of death to which totalitarian movements aspire, hoping
through mass murder to nip politics in the bud at its basis in human
existence. The pathos of mobilisation that accompanies the crisis in
which strictly everything is at stake is a highly equivocal descendant of
the revolutionary afflatus, substituting for the radically new beginning
the absolute end.9 In the decision concerning the whole, the whole comes
into view. The apocalyptic register is, however, apolitical, as Arendt
makes plain in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
Something seems to be involved in modern politics that actually should never
be involved in politics as we used to understand it, namely all or nothing – all,
and that is an undetermined infinity of forms of human living-together, or
nothing, for a victory of the concentration-camp system would mean the same
inexorable doom for human beings as the use of the hydrogen bomb would
mean the doom of the human race. (Arendt 1967: 443)
It is precisely as that which can never be made whole, as that which can
never be assigned its determinate place within the totality of what is, as
the non-totalisable space of the possibilities of action in distinction from
124 James Phillips
bare actuality, that the political opens itself up. It is here that a people, in
Deleuze’s sense, is invented. While it never ceases to be missing inasmuch
as it foregoes sovereignty and recognition as a determinate identity, what
was viewed as its privative condition now assumes an affirmative charge.
Arendt’s own account of political action, elaborated in the wake of her
study of totalitarianism, tellingly privileges the non-total, the disruptive,
as Friedrich Pohlmann contends:
Her theory of totalitarianism is conceived as the inverse of her theory

of politics, as the model of a reality that represents the radical negation
of her reading of the essence of politics, as a system that aims at the
systematic destruction of the basic anthropological traits of human existence.
Totalitarianism embodies for Hannah Arendt the extreme manifestation of
the antithesis of power and violence that is constitutive for her theory
of politics, because it attempts through systematic terror to extirpate all
possibilities of power, freedom and revolution. (Pohlmann 1998: 225)
Totalitarianism, in Arendt’s sense, drives towards death because it sets

itself against the diversity and plurality that is the very condition of
living human beings. By identifying the drive towards death as the
marker of totalitarianism, Arendt breaks with the previous use of
the concept. In the originality of her approach there is contrariwise
a loyalty to Heidegger’s treatment of totality in Being and Time, as
though Division Two of the latter work had predisposed Arendt to
suspect in totalitarianism a commitment to ending human existence.
For Heidegger, to exist is to fall short of totality: ‘in Dasein there is
always something still outstanding . . . As long as Dasein is as an entity,
it has never reached its “wholeness”’ (Heidegger 1962: 236). Heidegger’s
totality, in which existence is extinguished and from which no truths of
Dasein can be read off, corresponds, at the least, to the semantic context
in which Arendt construes totalitarianism as a self-negating politics.
Arendt’s denunciation of the regime to which Heidegger pledged
allegiance in 1933 does not entail a rejection of the philosophy that
Heidegger invoked and compromised in his attempts to justify that
allegiance. Her concept of natality, of the rupture effected by each new
generation, deploys itself in a polemic against totalitarianism’s cult of
death, rather than against Heidegger’s phenomenological description
of mortality, with which it shares the conviction of the openness of
human identity.10 Conformist behaviour under totalitarian regimes is
never conformist enough to satisfy a genuinely totalitarian dictatorship
in Arendt’s sense and is no substitute for the conformism (the biological
predictability) of the dead. The erasure of individuality, the stripping
away of the rights of the legal person, and the calculability of responses
under institutionalised terror are only steps on the way, not the goal
itself. For Arendt, as Margaret Canovan puts it, totalitarianism was a
hurricane, rather than a frozen mountain lake (Canovan 2000: 26).
Arendt’s is only one voice in the debate over the nature of
totalitarianism. The lack of consensus regarding the delimitation of the
term makes room for a freewheeling, pejorative use: the DDR can be
drawn into a murky class with Stalinist Russia and any effort to extricate
it, especially in West Germany prior to the fall of the Wall, risked
being cried down as morally and factually obtuse apologetics. Deleuze
and Guattari, even as they differ from Arendt in their handling of the
term ‘totalitarian’, differ furthermore from the Western government
discourse that reserved the term for the nations of the communist
bloc: in A Thousand Plateaus it is Pinochet’s Chile that they offer
as an example of the totalitarianism of the anarcho-capitalist state
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 510–11). In the tit-for-tat exchanges of
the rhetoric of the Cold War, the BRD was, for its part, depicted
in the East German media as the continuation of National Socialism.
This was, of course, to overlook a great many changes, such as the
institutional checks in the federal system to any new centralisation of
power (the DDR remained far more centralised). The depiction also
involved misreading the similarities between monopoly capitalism in
post-war West Germany and monopoly capitalism in 1930s Germany,
as though the economocentric picture of National Socialism frequent
in communist assessments in the 1930s, according to which National
Socialism was the favoured political instrument of monopoly capitalism,
held good despite the expropriations and universal devastation of the
1940s. With a broad brush the SED painted all opponents, internal and
abroad, as fascists. No doubt the Adenauer government in Bonn exposed
itself to criticism through the leniency and lethargy with which it went
about bringing former Nazis to trial. Under the Soviets in the East,
between 150,000 and 200,000 people ended up in internment camps as
suspected Nazis: between 70,000 and 80,000 died, around 10,000 were
sentenced to 25 years’ forced labour, and around 40,000 were deported
to the USSR. In the BRD, by contrast, 5,866 cases had come before
the courts by 1955. The differences between the penalties meted out in
the East and in the West are vertiginous. In 1950, for instance, a West
German de-Nazification board categorised Wilhelm Stuckart as simply a
‘fellow traveller’, even though eight years earlier he had represented the
Reich Ministry for the Interior at the Wannsee Conference, where the
extermination policies that led to the deaths of millions were drafted. In
126 James Phillips
1952 he was fined 50,000 DM. The presence in the uppermost echelons
of the Adenauer government of Hans Globke, who with his former
superior, Wilhelm Stuckart, had compiled in 1936 the first official
commentary on the Nuremberg Race Laws and who testified for the
latter in his post-war trial, was indicative, for Arendt as for the DDR,
of a pervasive reluctance in West Germany to see justice done. In East
Germany, the attitude adopted was uncompromising: even buildings
considered tainted by Germany’s imperialist past were found guilty, so to
speak, and levelled in line with an agenda of Vergangenheitsbewältigung
durch Abriss (coming to terms with the past through demolition). The
DDR, unlike the BRD up until 1996, observed a day of remembrance
for the victims of fascism11 and it paid survivors of anti-communist
persecution an augmented pension, which the federal government, after
the fall of the Wall, scaled back.
Sharing the scorched earth of the Nazi state as their site of genesis, the
DDR and the BRD exhibit a range of responses to the problem of how
a nation disentangles itself from totalitarianism. For all the zeal with
which the DDR addressed the problem, and on which it prided itself and
took the Federal Republic to task, the regime was markedly unsuccessful
in avoiding the appearance, both domestically and internationally, of a
police state. This is not ironic, for that against which the DDR exerted
itself was not totalitarianism in the broad sense, but National Socialism:
the very term ‘totalitarianism’, with its broader sense, was denounced
in the communist bloc as a trope of Western political rhetoric. On its
guard against any resurgence of German imperialism, the DDR showed
less sensitivity on the question of its own role in Soviet imperialism – or,
to put it otherwise, in contrast with its Western critics, it made more
of the difference between an imperialism grounded on the enslavement
and eradication of ‘alien’ peoples and an imperialism at least promising
proletarian revolution.
For the SED, coming to power in defeated Nazi Germany with
the backing of the Red Army rather than a popular mandate, their
initial suspicion of lingering fascist tendencies among the citizens of the
DDR consolidated into an unbridgeable gulf between the government
and the population at large. The SED drew the legitimacy of its rule
from the people of Marxist doctrine. To be voted out of power by a
people of fascist sympathisers was not a meaningful possibility, since
no political legitimacy could spring from a people blindly sacrificing
itself to the interests of racists and imperialist adventurers: such a
people did not know itself and could not speak in its own name. From
certain angles, the SED ruled not so much for the populace of the
DDR as in spite of them. Having spent the Nazi period in exile in the
Soviet Union, many leading figures in the SED did not share the guilt,
real or imagined, of those who had remained in Germany. The writer
Christa Wolf wrote often of the unquestionable moral authority that
the communist veterans enjoyed over a generation that felt gagged by
complicity in the crimes of Hitler’s regime.12 This image of the DDR as
a martyrocracy, as a country whose leadership’s claim to legitimacy lay
in its sufferings under the preceding dictatorship, of course glosses over
a great deal, and for the generation born after the overthrow of National
Socialism feelings of culpability were far less likely to get the better of
dissent.
III. Natality, Rupture and Oblivion

The innocence or ignorance that later generations bring to the rules of
the game is, according to Arendt, destabilising for despotic regimes (in
Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze implies that such obtuseness is not the
prerogative of the young, as the active individual’s faculty of forgetting
exerts a similarly destabilising force on established structures (Deleuze
2006: 109). In the context of the struggles against dictatorial political
systems, ‘natality’ acquires for Arendt a straightforwardly positive value.
‘The frailty of human institutions and laws and, generally, of all matter
pertaining to men’s living together, arises from the human condition
of natality and is quite independent of the frailty of human nature’
(Arendt 1958a: 191). It is the biological condition of the possibility
of a revitalisation of the plurality of perspectives in the public sphere.
Christa Wolf’s belief in the unimpugnability of the heroic generation
of communist veterans attests that the repression of public debate in
the DDR was, at least to begin with, not unilateral, from the direction
of the SED alone: there was, if not a widespread, yet an articulate
conviction that the public had forfeited its say in government. This
is what renders the DDR unusual in the history of despotic regimes,
which is not to contend that it exhaustively describes the reality of the
interactions between the state and the people (the constant waves of
submissions and complaints – Eingaben – are a ready reservation, which
nonetheless also secure the DDR a quantitatively distinct place in the
history of the Eastern Bloc, for everywhere else the culture of the
Cahiers de doléance took hold of the popular imagination to a lesser
degree). Shaftesbury’s proposition from the early eighteenth century on
the relationship between despotism and the public sphere hence lets itself
be understood in a new way: ‘And where absolute power is, there is
128 James Phillips
no public’ (Shaftesbury 1963: 72). In the image of the DDR suggested

by Wolf, the public, rather than being driven out from political life,
has retreated from it, and the SED leadership made its element the
vacuum opened up by the public’s withdrawal. Yet cut off from the
general population and bound together by shared experiences of exile
in the Soviet Union, the SED leadership could not easily renew itself as
its members aged and died. In 1989 Erich Honecker, a dictator who
nonetheless looked like he had stepped out of a painting by Gilbert and
George, was already 77 and Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, was 81.
Even without perestroika and glasnost, spiralling international debts and
growing opposition at home, the SED leadership was in an unsustainable
position. The Nazi-era experiences that legitimated it could not be
passed on to the next generation. And as Sigrid Meuschel writes: ‘The
economy stagnated because the leading gerontocrat did not dare to
embark on any reform experiments; they feared “convergence”, that is,
their country’s loss of the socialist structures which alone guaranteed
the GDR’s raison d’être’ (Meuschel 2005: 108). Juan José Linz puts it
more sharply still, comparing the regime to its Soviet bloc neighbours:
‘The case of East Germany was even more dramatic: if it was not to be a
socialist state, why should it exist at all?’ (Linz 2000: 31). Egon Krenz,
Honecker’s chosen but precipitate successor, took office in October
1989, at the age of 52, but was unable to provide the regime with a
new lease on life.
The unwillingness to relinquish power to a younger generation
that is characteristic of a gerontocracy is, in the case of the ruling
clique of the SED, simply a late manifestation of the longstanding
mistrust of the general population. The decision-making processes
were centralised – this can be attributed not only to a lust for power
and the influence of the Bolshevik model, but also to the perceived
untrustworthiness of anyone who had not been in the German
Communist Party (KPD) before 1933 and who had not then received
political training in the Soviet Union. As the politburo in East Berlin
was not prepared to delegate decision-making to any considerable
degree, it became bogged down in the minutiae of ruling the country.
It was inflexible and unresponsive even before this inflexibility and
unresponsiveness were imputable to the advanced age of its members.
So long as the people were untrustworthy, that is, so long as the SED
mistrusted the people, the SED could believe itself entitled to rule in their
place. In this respect, the purpose of the state’s economically wasteful
surveillance apparatus was not so much to find anything out as to
remind the SED that the population could not be trusted: the exercise
of surveillance was more important than the collected data. Although

untrustworthiness can be proved, it can never be definitively disproved,
since one cannot prove oneself trustworthy to such an extent that trust
passes over into certainty: to trust is not to know; it is to grant an
unpredictability to human behaviour. Whereas the legitimating myth
of the democratic form of government is that it rests on the trust of
the people, the SED’s legitimating myth was the untrustworthiness of
the people, with spying substituting for the ceremony of elections.13
In name, of course, the DDR was a democracy, and it is also true
that every representative democracy registers a tension between its
concept of the people and the reality of the population. In the DDR,
however, the concept and the reality were frequently at war. This is its
sinister family resemblance with the Jacobin Reign of Terror, Stalinism
and National Socialism, which all judged their populations against an
articulated concept of the people and found them wanting. Where a
democracy has been able to manage the tension between the concept
and the reality of the people, the success has often been inadvertent:
rather than clarify the nature and goal of the sovereign people from
which it nonetheless claims to derive its legitimacy, such a democracy
is content to muddle through, and if this bizarre lack of intellectual
curiosity concerning the precise character of its own basis saps so-
called democratic politics of some of its seriousness, opening it up to
careerists and the short-sighted, it also ensures a measure of tolerance
toward differences and changes among the population – the formalism
for which Lukács condemned such democracies is therefore not simply
the bulwark of purely individual, ‘bourgeois’ freedoms. The government
of the DDR, elected by the all-too-clear concept of the people of Marxist
doctrine, a people to be known rather than trusted, did not require the
trust of the real population (in 1953, as Brecht’s poem ‘Die Lösung’
chronicles, the population could even be openly reproved for having
lost the government’s confidence). The 1989 placard ‘Wir sind das Volk’
is therefore also a desperate exercise in self-persuasion – ‘We really are
the people’ – and hence something other than a democratic platitude:
that it has to be stated implies that it cannot be taken for granted
that the people is not missing. Mistrusted as enemies of the proletariat
and excluded from the workings of government, the citizens of the
DDR were by and large subjects rather than citizens. They did not
compose the state but were subject to it and even physically contained
by it.
It would be an exaggeration to portray the East German Government
as running through its allotted time on earth in complete indifference
130 James Phillips
and hostility to the demands of the general population. One reason

given for Ulbricht’s removal from power in 1971 was his disregard
of the housing crisis. As the regime defined itself by its difference
from National Socialism, it trod more gently around the question of
a constitution and the separation of powers. Many of its injustices
were crimes according to its own laws and thus present less of a legal
quandary than the sanctioned criminality of Hitler’s dictatorship. Unlike
Nazi Germany, the DDR offered the appearance of a state under the rule
of law. That it was only an appearance does not distinguish the DDR
from Western democracies, where unconstitutional abuses of power in
the administration of justice also occur, if on a lesser scale.14 The fall
of the Wall created a public space in which to throw light on these
abuses. Taking advantage of the freedom of information after 1989, the
publisher Walter Janka, for example, uncovered the letter in which over
three decades earlier the head public prosecutor, Melsheimer, in defiance
of article 127 of the 1949 constitution, recommended that Janka be
sentenced to seven years in prison (Janka 1994: 67–8). Charlotte von
Mahlsdorf, the most celebrated instance of becoming-woman in the
DDR, records the similarly underhanded attempt to expropriate the
Gründerzeitmuseum she had assembled:
I refused to sign at once, as Maurer had demanded of me in a rasping voice,

and looked up the named sections for myself. A laborious undertaking that
occupied me for weeks, since in the DDR it was not so easy to come at law
texts: the citizens were in this way already done out of their rights because
one made it impossible for them to inform themselves about these rights.
When I opened the page with the text of the statute book 11/47, great was
my astonishment: the decree did not concern the right to run a museum,
but rather treated a law about – fisheries. I had been knowingly misled.
(Mahlsdorf 1992: 149–50)
The expropriation order was successfully contested.

With respect to the occupying Soviet forces, by contrast, the letter
of the law was effectively dead. Between 1976 and 1989 the DDR
Militäroberstaatsanwalt (military prosecutor’s office) registered over
27,000 incidents, around 20,000 crimes against property, 3,000 traffic
offences (629 involving death) and 705 rapes (Koop 1996: 245). Not
one culprit was brought before a DDR court. Public discussion of the
criminality of Soviet troops was furthermore taboo. This criminality was
a persistent grievance against the SED, which relied on the Red Army as
guarantor of its authority. The size of the occupying forces was always
substantial and counteracted any belief in the popular basis of the SED’s
rule. In 1945 the number of Soviet soldiers in the region was roughly
450,000 and had dropped by October 1990 only to 363,690.
That the DDR was a client state could have escaped no one. Tactlessly,
the Soviet ambassador was even in the habit of calling in the SED
leadership to deliver instructions. But the SED did make some attempt
to appear more than the puppet government of a foreign occupying
power. Against the foreignness of the regime’s military foundation with
its refusal to submit itself to the law of the land could be played off the
Germanness of Marx and Engels, the regime’s theoretical foundation. In
its search for a German revolutionary pedigree, the DDR took its cue
from Engels and claimed the sixteenth-century Anabaptist theologian
Thomas Müntzer as its own, placing his likeness on the 5 Ostmark note.
Whether the argument for self-subsistence originated with the SED is
open to debate: in her analysis of the Hungarian Revolution, Arendt
detects in the masquerade of the satellite system a Soviet initiative for the
mollification of Western fears of imperialist expansion (Arendt 1958b:
507).
For both sides in the Cold War, the DDR was something of a
fiction. The framers of the 1949 Basic Law (Grundgesetz) of the Federal
Republic took care not to formalise the separate legal existence of the
Soviet Occupation Zone and, once it was no longer propped up by
the Red Army, the DDR’s inability to stand on its own was obvious.
Paradigmatically – and that is to say, simplistically – the DDR was the
state apparatus reduced to violence. It invites being cast as the example
of one end of the scale showing the inverse proportion between popular
support and state violence. For the purposes of taxonomic shorthand, it
is the state that existed solely as violence and the threat of violence, the
disciplinary violence of despotism rather than the genocidal violence of
Arendtian totalitarianism. Viewed in such terms, the DDR is nothing
new and belongs to the long history of foreign military occupations
with their attendant home-grown collaborators. The DDR, which had
never trusted itself to popular support, did not collapse because this
support was withheld. For various reasons, among which have to be
counted the billions of DM from Bonn, the Soviet leadership let the
regime disintegrate. The iconic image of revolution, where the palace
guards switch sides and go over to the people, renouncing violence in
favour of power, as Arendt understands it, has limited application to the
events of 1989.
And yet we should not be too quick to bury past becomings in
history. For the space of the protests, as the people’s republic of the
DDR shatters and the BRD has not begun to pick up the pieces,
132 James Phillips
the polysemy of the term ‘people’ is transformed into a constellation

of reciprocally contesting forces. In a recent article Ronald Bogue,
discounting interpretations of Deleuze’s ‘people’ that reduce it to either
an idealistic retreat from politics (cf. Mengue) or to Nietzschean
ressentiment, writes: ‘The people to come, in short, will be a people
perpetually generating differences, potential asymmetries of power,
and sites of resistance for those who find themselves faced with the
intolerable’ (Bogue 2011: 90). Without a little faith in the traces of the
uncanny, without a little obliviousness to the prevailing accounts we
risk misreading the features of the people to come. The official people of
the East German regime, as different as it was from the people of Nazi
race theory and the people of the nineteenth-century European nation
state, was opposed in 1989 in the name of another people that, for
tactical reasons, governments on both sides of the Wall claimed to be
able to identify as pro-Western and pro-capitalist. What is overlooked
or suppressed in readings of the anti-government demonstrations is the
immanent critique of the very notion of a people’s republic: the people
cannot be made one.
Comparatively speaking, the Wende went smoothly. A popular
uprising took place, street protests were held throughout the DDR,
placards proclaimed ‘Wir sind das Volk’ in denial of the government’s
pretensions to represent the people, but this people of the streets did
not then pass through the familiar crises of revolutionary government
where a plurality of voices seeks to reinvent itself as a decision-making
process. It was cheated of its moment. The relative ease with which the
BRD incorporated the old East Germany can be put down to the overlap
under the DDR of two senses of the word ‘people’. The people in the
sense of the legitimating authority of a nation state, problematically
unitary for being modelled on the individual sovereign of monarchies
and repressed as a nationalist legacy by the SED, commingled with
the people in the sense of those who have always been excluded from
government. Sealing the fracture between these two senses curtailed the
possibility for a people to come. The people of the popular uprising, of
a public sphere suddenly torn open to new demands and expectations,
did not take long to fall into line with the so-called sovereign German
people of the Federal Republic. But if there is a clear nationalist
discourse behind the union of the two Germanies, it is a discourse held
in check on many fronts: by a widespread perception of Germany’s
place in the European Union and the reality of mass migration, by
an averseness to perpetuating the doctrines and prejudices of the
imperialist past, and by a sobriety, which can pass for common sense
or fatigue, in relation to modernity’s various post-monarchical attempts

to reconstitute sovereignty in the nation. The sovereignty that Germany
unmistakably exercises within the Eurozone is not popular sovereignty,
but rather the sovereignty of German capital. As the latter does not
claim to be the people, it does not feel itself jeopardised by a counter-
claim from a protesting populace. The people of the revolutionary event
to come must discover a way in which it can be actively missing, in
Deleuze’s sense, from the prevailing discourse of power and not simply
indifferent to it. This is not a task assigned paradoxically to the people
as subject, to the sovereign people waiting in the wings of history
for whenever a revolution loses its nerve. It is instead the task of the
unresolvable multiplicity that composes a people.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported under Australian Research Council’s
Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number 0771619).
Notes
1. See Deleuze 1995: 171: ‘They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’re
constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out
historically and people’s revolutionary becoming.’ See Arendt 1963: 49: ‘The sad
truth of the matter is that the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has
made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful,
has remained an event of little more than local importance.’
2. The panel’s deliberations and conclusions are documented in Sabrow et al. 2007.
3. At certain points in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt’s attention to
the concept of totalitarianism – as distinct from its empirical evidence – lends
her writing an eerily prescriptive tone. See, for instance, Arendt 1967: 448:
‘Under no circumstances must the concentration camp become a calculable
punishment for definite offenses.’ It is as though the regimes of Hitler
and Stalin are themselves but approximations of what Arendt designates
‘totalitarian’.
4. The Origins of Totalitarianism is the consciously paradoxical attempt
to provide the background for something nonetheless unprecedented. See
Arendt, ‘On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding’,
undated typescript, Library of Congress, MSS Box 76, 7: ‘The elements
of totalitarianism form its origins if by origins we do not understand
“causes.” . . . Elements by themselves never cause anything. They become
origins of events if and when they suddenly crystallize into fixed and definite
forms.’
5. Arendt did not coin the word ‘totalitarian’, but in response to events she
reorientated its definition. As it was from early on in its history applied to
both communist and fascist regimes, it lent itself to denoting the wholesale
destructiveness that was a common feature of Hitler’s and Stalin’s dictatorships.
134 James Phillips
Alfons Paquet, a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, wrote in 1919

of Lenin’s ‘revolutionary totalism’. Giovanni Amendola, in an article for Il
Mondo in 1923, discussed the ‘sistema totalitario’ of fascist policy, and in 1925
Mussolini appropriated the word in a speech.
6. See the discussion appended to Friedrich 1954: 76.
7. See, for instance, Arendt 1967: 391, n.7: ‘This constant radicalization of the
principle of racial selection can be found in all phases of Nazi policy. Thus, the
first to be exterminated were the full Jews, to be followed by those who were
half-Jewish and one-quarter Jewish; or first the insane, to be followed by the
incurably sick and, eventually, by all families in which there were any “incurably
sick.” The “selection which can never stand still” did not stop before the SS itself,
either.’
8. For an account of the tensions in Arendt’s concept of totalitarianism as it is
expounded in the different parts and editions (first and second, English and
German) of The Origins of Totalitarianism, see Tsao 2002.
9. When at the British Labour Party’s 2004 spring conference Jack Straw
called terrorism in the wake of the Madrid train bombings ‘the new
totalitarianism’, the identification is clearly closer to Arendt’s theory of
totalitarianism than to Friedrich and Brzezinski’s. See http://news.bbc.co.
uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3507730.stm (accessed 21 January 2014).
10. Seyla Benhabib, however, reads the lexical inversion as a conceptual inversion of
Heidegger. See Benhabib 2003: 107. Where Arendt herself contrasts the isolation
of mortality – one dies on one’s own – with the collectivism of natality – one is
born into a world with others, it counts more as a reflection on her theoretical
focus than a polemic against Heidegger. This is clear in The Human Condition.
See Arendt 1958a: 9: ‘since action is the political activity par excellence, natality,
and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as opposed to
metaphysical, thought’. See also Arendt 2002: 461. Heidegger’s concern with
mortality is less with the isolation of the moment of death than with the
existentially illuminating temporality of the ‘not yet’ of Being-towards-death. To
exist, as it means not yet having reached the moment of death, is to be precisely
not on one’s own.
11. The victims of fascism whose deaths were honoured came, by and large, from
the ranks of the KPD. Jeffrey Herf argues that the DDR, through its opposition
to the state of Israel and its marginalisation of Jewish suffering under Hitler,
was more of an heir to Nazi totalitarianism than the Federal Republic. See Herf
2008.
12. See, for example, ‘Unerledigte Widersprüche: Gespräch mit Therese Hörnigk’ in
Wolf 1994: 29–30.
13. Cf. Maier 1997: 47: ‘What impact did all the spying have? Ostensibly it gathered
information, kilometers of reports, often of the most trivial and self-evident
kind conveyed in the jargon that secret police everywhere use to describe
“subversives” or elements hostile to the state. But ultimately, the information
was not what was important. What really counted, I would argue, was first
the opaqueness that the institution created for the regime or, more precisely,
the distorting translucence. The Stasi provided the regime with its arcana
imperii, the power of mystification and secrecy on which its capacity to corrupt
independent action, stifle dissent, and preclude the emergence of a public realm
depended.’
14. Overt party interference in the administration of justice declined over the
course of the regime, not just at the level of the politburo. For an appraisal
of the political history of one East German trial court alongside some general
observations, see Markovits 2006.
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Bonn: Bouvier.
Linz, Juan José (2000) Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner.
Mahlsdorf, Charlotte von (1992) Ich bin meine eigene Frau: Ein Leben, Berlin: Diá.
Maier, Charles S. (1997) Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East
Germany, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Markovits, Inga (2006) ‘Transitions to Constitutional Democracies: The German
Democratic Republic’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science, 603:1, pp. 140–154.
Meuschel, Sigrid (2005) ‘Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Totalitarianism and the Post-
Stalinist Constellation’, Telos, 132, pp. 99–108.
Pohlmann, Friedrich (1998) ‘Der “Keim des Verderbens” totalitärer Herrschaft:
Die Einheit der politischen Philosophie Hannah Arendts’, in Achim Siegel (ed.),
Totalitarismus nach dem Ende des Kommunismus, Cologne: Böhlau, pp. 201–34.
Sabrow, Martin (1998) ‘Die Geschichtswissenschaft der DDR und ihr objektiver
“Gegner”’, Historische Zeitschrift: Beihefte, 27, pp. 53–91.
Sabrow, Martin, Rainer Eckert, Monika Flacke, Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Roland
Jahn, Freya Klier, Tina Krone, Peter Maser, Ulrike Poppe and Hermann Rudolph
(eds) (2007) Wohin treibt die DDR-Erinnerung?: Dokumentation einer Debatte,
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Shaftesbury, Third Earl of [1711] (1963) Characteristics on Men, Manners,
Opinions, Times, etc., ed. John M. Robertson, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.
Smith, Daniel W. (2003) ‘Deleuze and the Liberal Tradition: Normativity, Freedom
and Judgement’, Economy and Society 32: 2, pp. 299–324.
Tassin, Etienne (2012) ‘De la Subjectivación Política: Althusser/
Rancière/Foucault/Arendt/Deleuze’, trans. Andrea Mejía, Revista de Estudios
Sociales, 43, pp. 36–49.
Tsao, Roy T. (2002) ‘The Three Phases of Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism’,
Social Research, 69:2, pp. 579–619
Wolf, Christa (1994) Im Dialog: Aktuelle Texte, Munich: DTV.
Book Reviews
Edward Campbell (2013) Music after Deleuze, London: Bloomsbury

I. All Music is ‘Deleuzian’
Music after Deleuze is a pedagogically orientated text and part of a series
of volumes Deleuze Encounters (with Ian Buchanan as Series Editor)
whose stated objective is to ‘provide students in philosophy and related
subjects with concise and accessible introductions to the applications
of Deleuze’s work in key areas of study’. Each volume is named ‘_ after
Deleuze’ which immediately gestures towards a central problem in how
Deleuze is applied to a subject: has (or will) the emergence of Deleuzian
thought produced a significant articulation in the matter under study
itself (in this case music), or is the principal project to rethink the
paradigms and ideologies which scholars/audiences bring to the subject?
Does musical production, once armed with the technologies of Deleuze
and Guattari, ‘change’ after Deleuze, or is it our understanding of music
that is changed or ought to change? Although this problem is not
stated explicitly by Campbell, the orientation of Music after Deleuze
is decidedly of the first sort. Campbell states ‘The composers whose
music and ideas work most within Deleuzian terms are those who first
molecularise, deconstruct or dissolve existing musical material, who
attempt to empty it of existing connotations or who strive to use familiar
sounds or musical gestures in unfamiliar ways’ (Campbell 2013: 148).
Accordingly, some musics are more ‘Deleuzian’ than others. I don’t
believe that this is a defensible or desirable stance. Deleuze is foremost
a metaphysician, and it cannot be held that a metaphysics has an
uneven relevance to the world. The question must remain how Deleuzian
thought applies to any music. All music ‘molecularises’, ‘deconstructs’,
and ‘dissolves’ itself. This is a crucial point, and we will see why. In
any case, Campbell’s argument tacitly, in its concepts, and actually,
in its subject matter, privileges contemporary Western ‘art’ music as

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paradigmatically Deleuzian even though he gestures towards other forms

of music.
A consistent understanding of Deleuze vis-à-vis the aesthetic is hardly
transparent. Does the analyses of modernist repertoire in A Thousand
Plateaus mean for us that this is the most relevant or ‘Deleuzian’
music? I do not believe so. Yet we need not cancel these analyses
either. The logic of ‘and . . . and . . . and . . . ’ opens onto the entire
world of music. Certainly Campbell is an admirably thorough scholar
in his depth. Between A Thousand Plateaus and his excellent work
on modernist composers such as Pierre Boulez, a relatively consistent,
though narrow, picture of how Deleuze relates to music is presented. In
effect, Campbell’s musicological knowledge mirrors in many ways the
limited perspective of Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.
However, important critiques of Deleuze’s entanglement with Boulez’s
ideologies (and modernist, structuralist composers in general) ought to
make an appearance in any overview of Deleuzian thought on music.
Campbell chooses not to engage this critique on the whole, therefore
subjecting his book to the very critiques one might launch against
Deleuze and Guattari. For those conversant in both the ideologies
of musical modernism and the broader Deleuzian oeuvre, Campbell’s
account amplifies these problems. We are left wondering how exactly
these pre-Deleuzian, structuralist ideologies can be understood as
compatible with Deleuze and post-structuralist thought in general.
Martin Scherzinger offers a nuanced critique of the problematic
relationship between Boulez and Deleuze/Guattari. Scherzinger aims the
rhizomatic, anti-ontological thought of A Thousand Plateaus directly at
Boulez, ironically mobilising the very terms Deleuze and Guattari harvest
from Boulez. For Scherzinger, Boulez’s musical logic ensures that ‘. . .
musical lines of flight are recouped in some kind of unified structure’
(Scherzinger 2010: 120). In other words the identity of structure
subordinates any nomadic/rhizomatic actualisation. Scherzinger notes
further that Boulez’s ‘language of absolutes . . . tarries awkwardly the
nomadism of Deleuze and Guattari’ (121). Campbell does acknowledge
that the terms invented by Boulez are not used the same way once
appropriated by Deleuze and Guattari. Exactly how they are different
is not specified.
Campbell’s volume begins with discussions of basic Deleuzian
concepts. In his first chapter, ‘Music, Difference and Repetition’,
Campbell lays out ways in which ‘identity thinking’ appears in musical
discourse. While he notes that ‘Classical forms, such as that of sonata
or rondo form are all too easily caricatured as fixed identities . . . ’, he
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nevertheless claims that ‘. . . it would be foolish to deny that, in many

cases, this (“viewing music through the prism of a principle of identity”)
is exactly how certain repertoires are intended to be listened to, analysed
and interpreted’ (6). This sentence concludes the section, underlining an
ambiguity that is never quite resolved: if composers and their scholarly
interpreters think music through a principle of identity, why allow this
to pass uncontested? Perhaps even more problematically, how is it that
music ‘thinks’ or ‘exemplifies’ identity? Through its repetitions? I submit
that there is no such thing as identity thinking inherent to musical
becoming. Repetition is difference, the production of the ever new. It is
conceptual and representational thought about music that is vulnerable
to thinking this difference in terms of identity.
A tantalising subject for Campbell is how the virtual might work
in music. In ‘Heterophony: The Virtual Line’, one of the book’s more
outwardly inclusive sections, the reader’s attention is drawn to the idea
that a musical texture, however spare or dense, produces non-sonorous
‘lines’ which are manifest in perception. These lines might be described
as a natural (pseudo) synthesis of dynamic processes, like shifting centres
of gravity. Or they might be thought of, to use Boulez’s spatial analogy,
as panes of glass bearing variations of a pattern superimposed upon one
another (the pattern itself being what is virtual). The cumulative effect
is dynamic, intensive, but not heard (or seen), real without being actual.
Of course the virtual also encompasses not only the concatenation of
simultaneous events but the presence of moments past and of those to
come. It cannot be overstated how crucial this temporal process is to
music, and I will address Campbell’s treatment of musical time below.
Perhaps the most frustrating issue facing Campbell, and by extension
his readers, is ‘where exactly Deleuzian difference lies in relation to more
traditional musical concepts’ (Campbell 2003: 23). He laments that the
overlapping of concepts between the modernists such as Boulez and
Deleuze is not present for other repertoires, thus giving us no immediate
point of hermeneutic entry. I would suggest that perhaps the problem is
exactly the reverse: how do we address properly Deleuzian concepts in
relation to (any) music when A Thousand Plateaus makes a bit of a mess
in its glorification of the modernists? We do so, I believe, by starting
over, as it were, with No Music – finding those principles constituting
the basic dynamics of becoming, and only then introducing sonorous
becoming. Campbell argues that ‘we cannot hope’ to find conceptual
overlap between Deleuze and music as diverse as Beethoven and jazz
improvisation. That depends on where our concepts originate. I contend
that we can hope and indeed we must – for whatever concepts created by
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musicologists that presuppose the difference/identity duality (including

those by modernists) a corresponding ‘undoing’ is required, followed by
creative reconceptualisation.
An undoing of this kind, however radical it might be, is neither
promised nor delivered. What is presented as ‘rethinking’ often seems
more like ‘translation’ (that is, of conventional concepts). In his chapter
on pitch space, Campbell distinguishes two types of spaces: an ‘interior
spatiality’ – what he calls the ‘pitch space continuum’ and an ‘exterior
spatiality’ which is the ‘arena in which a musical performance occurs’
(Campbell 2013: 68). This distinction already invokes problems of a
Cartesian sort that are left aside. Campbell tells us that he is restricting
his study ‘to those aspects of interior pitch space that are conceived of
as some kind of continuous or discontinuous spectrum of sounds’ (68).
He also claims a ‘conviction that Modernist music reveals music’s spatial
qualities in ways that are not quite the case in most other music’ (69).
So what constitutes this ‘space?’
The idea of a sound continuum seems to refer simply to the range of
frequencies perceptible by human beings. How this becomes a ‘space’
is an impermissible abstraction. The idea that sonorous perception
implicates or striates some pre-constituted space would seem to produce
the negative. We do not perceive sounds in terms of locational
relationships with non-present sounds (that is, non-actual and non-
virtual). Rather, perception of sound is the immanent movement of
actual/virtual becomings, which may produce retentions and projections
of pre- and post-actual sound images. These images must be produced
by virtual-actual processes in every case. This is a much more nimble
and process-orientated conception of sonorous becoming than the idea
of hopping around a pre-given striated space (which is arguably not a
space at all, but a line of infinitely possible points which disappear on
either end into the imperceptible).
Pitch space is a concept one finds in contemporary post-tonal theory.
The ‘shape’ of this theory is a direct outcome or codification of
the machinations of structuralist composers such as Milton Babbitt
who dissected music into distinct parameters (pitch, volume, duration,
register and timbre), applying to each the same numeric logic of points
and distances. (See Strauss 1990: the chapter ‘Basic Concepts and
Definitions’ methodically abstracts sonority into pitch and then abstracts
pitch into numbers which may be added and subtracted expressing an
‘amount’ of difference or distance.) Pitch-class space is an even more
abstract concept, usually depicted as a series of twelve evenly distributed
points around a circle. Indeed, the logic of spatiality defined by points
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and distances seems to govern the discourse of contemporary music

theory in general. Deleuze’s ‘How Do We Recognise Structuralism?’ lists
seven criteria which define every properly structuralist theory. This topic
warrants a much more thorough discussion than can be presented here.
However, a cursory view of the first two criteria is illuminative.
The ‘Symbolic’ criterion is characteristic of structuralism in that it is
defined by:
. . . the nature of certain atomic elements which claim to account both for the
formation of wholes and the variation of their parts . . . it is . . . a combinatory
formula supporting formal elements which by themselves have neither form,
nor content, nor given empirical reality, nor hypothetical functional model,
nor intelligibility behind appearances. (Deleuze 2004: 173)
These structural ‘objects’ are ‘irreducible to the orders of the real and
the imaginary, and deeper than they are’ (173). The second criterion
is ‘Local or Positional,’ which is ‘not a matter of a location in a real
spatial expanse . . . Space is what is structural, but an unextended,
pre-extensive space, pure spatium constituted bit by bit as an order of
proximity . . . ’ (174). ‘Atomic elements’ defined in terms of their position
(or ‘distance’) in relation to other such elements could not better describe
the objects of post-tonal theory (which nowadays has been extended to
tonal repertoires as well). Campbell’s concept of pitch space not only
avoids any confrontation with conventional music theory – it apparently
confirms music theory’s structuralist pitch space unproblematically. It
is ‘interior’, and yet, as noted below, Campbell also claims a kind of
autonomous existence for music outside perception.
We are brought, then, to Campbell’s exposition on musical time.
Relying as he does on A Thousand Plateaus Campbell hovers around the
trap of taking Boulez’s notion of smooth and striated time as a paradigm
for understanding musical temporality. Of course the smooth and the
striated is a way of conceptualising process, continuously forming one
from the other. From the point of view of hermeneutics or analysis
smooth space is primary. It allows thought to freely follow processes
of de/re-territorialisation. Striated space (and/or a spatial conception
of time) as a pseudo-ontological condition belongs to the State, where
the actual is overcoded with empty grids, and ‘difference in general’, or
identity, is inscribed in each space.
This confusion is directly related to the privileging of contemporary
Western art music which, in many of its incarnations, attempts to banish
rhythmic regularity (or pulse) altogether. If one simplistically holds that
the smooth is superior to the striated and, further, that pulsed music is
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equivalent to striated surfaces then naturally this narrow band of music

is elevated to premier status. Again, one need only weigh the central
position this music holds in Campbell’s book. It is telling that Campbell
affirms Schloezer’s assertion that music’s existence is ‘independent of
our apprehension, our mental states and of whatever physiological
and psychological processes it may elicit within us’ (Campbell 2003:
108). How this claim can be verified is a mystery to me, but it
clearly functions as a point of orientation for Campbell’s view of
music as a disembodied presence of a self-sufficient object prior to the
engagement and participation of a listener. It also serves to marginalise
the importance of Deleuze’s Bergsonian inflected conception of the
virtual. However, staking out an alternative theory would exceed the
scope here.
The very idea of a ‘striated time’ presupposes the linear time of
science. For Deleuze, time is multiple, moving in ‘two directions at once’
(‘It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both
directions at once’ and ‘This is the simultaneity of becoming whose
characteristic is to elude the present’ (Deleuze 1990a: 1), a continuous
passage of future into past and past into future (see Deleuze (1990b;
1994) for in-depth discussions of temporality vis-à-vis the virtual). These
multiple times are not ‘empty’ of content. The body acts as a site of
convergence of many virtual/temporal images where the present itself
is the ever-imminent moment of actualisation. So whatever confusion
exists about the idea of striated time as depicted in A Thousand Plateaus,
a broader awareness of Deleuze’s writings on temporality should tell us
that striated time is an abstract concept bound up with ‘clock’ or linear
time and therefore has no actualising function in the perceived temporal
process.
The conceptualisation of musical time is rather problematic if we
restrict our view to A Thousand Plateaus. The danger is to ‘go with’ the
proto-Boulezian distinctions of smooth and striated space mapped onto
time. This would be unacceptable in any other discussion of Deleuze and
temporal process. There are plenty of other moments in Deleuze’s oeuvre
we can turn to for guidance; in particular those pages in Difference and
Repetition that discuss musical rhythm. It is worth quoting Deleuze on
musical/temporality periodicity (‘equal’ durations) at length:
. . . a period exists only in so far as it is determined by a tonic accent

[articulation of beginning, author], commanded by intensities. Yet we
would be mistaken about the function of accents if we said that they
were reproduced at equal intervals. On the contrary, tonic and intensive
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values act by creating inequalities or incommensurabilities between metrically

equivalent periods or spaces. They create distinctive points, privileged instants
which always indicate a polyrhythm. Here again, the unequal is the most
positive element . . . . (Deleuze 1994: 21)
The most primary, I daresay primal feature of music, the articulation

of durational repetition, is already a temporal multiplicity produced here
and now, and through which the whole of the virtual/actual circuit is
channelled, drawing on the potential of a sonorous consistency-making
for infinitely novel becomings. The work of music theorist Christopher
Hasty, who restored meter to a process of rhythm and projection,
is exemplary here (Hasty: 1997). Campbell does not cite Hasty. For
that matter, the crucial discussion of musical time in Difference and
Repetition is nowhere to be found. If it were, I daresay a radically
different temporal conception would emerge; a conception that situates
the vast array of human musics on an even (metaphysical as well as
cultural) plane. No genre of music is privileged a priori. It is always
a question of the particularity of indivisible and individual embodied
sonorous becomings. Then we may ask, ‘how does Deleuze inform our
understanding of this or that musical process?’
Two critical issues are at stake. First is the affirmation of the
‘subjective’ experience of music, or the site of actualisation as a
primary process that constitutes music as such. Becoming-music is not
a property of sound waves, nor the variation of a priori structural
distances. It is an indivisible becoming of sound/body/world irreducible
to abstract representation. Second is the affirmation of musical styles of
innumerable traditions that, for the vast majority of people are what
music is – music that ‘breathes’, music that creates patterns and pulse.
The marginalisation of these musics in the service of commonplace
academic biases in favour of contemporary Eurocentric ‘art’ music is
unacceptable in contemporary discourse. Yes, we are interested in what
composers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have to say about
their music. But we need not and should not allow these ideologies to
determine what we think about this or any other music.
That pitch and time are separated into the vertical and the horizontal
is a conceptual invention – a product of mathematical representation or
the technology of Western music notation, or both. For Boulez to claim
the invention of a musical ‘diagonal’ or to attribute it to the music of
modernist composers presupposes that the vertical and horizontal ‘split’
between time and space is somehow metaphysically predetermined.
Music is and has always been ‘whole’; it is an Image of Thought that
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would separate musical space and musical time, creating an artificial

problem that is therefore artificially solved by modernism’s supposedly
uniquely diagonal music.
Finally, there is the question of the ontology of music. In his
conclusion, Campbell suggests that moving ‘toward an ontology of
music’ is a desirable goal, consistent with Deleuzian thinking. I see
this aspiration emerging frequently in current discourses. But Deleuze
is interested in connectivity rather than separation, and it cannot be
denied that music has dimensions of many sorts: biological, personal,
cultural, institutional and physical. Where do these leave off and the rest
of the world begin? Perhaps Deleuze’s metaphysics of process banishes
the very idea of ontological (that is, absolute) divisions. This position
is explicitly stated by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus
where the concept of the rhizome intends to ‘overthrow ontology, do
away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings (1987: 25). This
returns us to the question of whether scholars who engage Deleuze
really perform the radical work of Deleuzian philosophy, or if they use
Deleuzian ‘lingo’ to superficially attend to extant paradigms. Is Deleuze
just another subject matter to be ‘tamed’ by the academy? This is an
urgent question for any performance of Deleuze’s philosophy.
In Music after Deleuze Campbell presents insightful and convincing
analyses of the repertoire he selects. His scholarship is admirably
thorough. Theoretically, however, there are significant problems as we
have seen, and not nearly enough is done to overturn the sedentary
abstractions of conventional music theory or the elite self-historicism
of academic discourses surrounding contemporary Western ‘art’ music.
Much remains to be done.
Brian Hulse
College of William & Mary
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2015.0177
References
Campbell, Edward (2013) Music after Deleuze, London: Bloomsbury.
Deleuze, Gilles (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990a) The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark
Lester, New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990b) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam, Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Reviews 145
Deleuze, Gilles (2004) ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’, in Desert Islands

and Other Texts: 1953–1974, Cambridge: Semiotext(e), pp. 170–192.
Hasty, Christopher (1997) Meter as Rhythm. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Hulse and Nesbitt (2010) Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and
Philosophy of Music, Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Straus, Joseph N. (1990) Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
Musicology after Deleuze: Response to Brian Hulse’s Review of Music

after Deleuze – All Music is ‘Deleuzian’
Brian Hulse concludes his review noting that ‘much remains to be done’.
On this we can agree and, in saying so, he hits pretty much the note on
which I conclude Music after Deleuze. Our disagreement concerns the
precise nature of what exactly has been done and what remains to be
done.
Hulse is committed to a retheorising of sound/music in the light
of Deleuzian thought and he expresses the desirability of recalibrating
Deleuze’s philosophy in relation to musical modernity. While I have
never equated Deleuzian philosophy with musical modernism, I do
not share his conviction that Deleuze’s relationship with modernity
is fundamentally problematic and, for me, Deleuze’s engagement with
non-musical modernism in Mallarmé, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Beckett and
others is fertile soil from which important aspects of his philosophy arise
and develop. Deleuze’s engagement with musical modernism is part of
this larger picture. Consequently, I do not share Hulse’s premise that
‘A Thousand Plateaus makes a bit of a mess in its glorification of the
modernists’. Given this starting point, we were never going to agree.
The Deleuzo-Guattarian focus on musical modernity is indeed a
tendency I have amplified in my book. This fact notwithstanding,
there is sufficiently extended discussion of and reference to other
repertoires (pre-modern Western art music, Gaelic psalm-singing,
Javanese gamelan, Indian scale systems, jazz improvisation and
experimental pop music) to indicate clearly that musical modernism and
Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy cannot be equated. What for Hulse is
merely ‘narrow’ is my attempt to deal with a relatively neglected field
of music (an extended musical modernism) with a certain thoroughness,
all the time trying to show that this repertoire in no way exhausts the
Deleuzian. A number of the composers and musicians discussed in the
book are not frequently cited in interdisciplinary studies and I have no
qualms in restating that their work qualifies as ‘minor’ in the Deleuzo-
Guattarian sense.
Reviews 145
Deleuze, Gilles (2004) ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’, in Desert Islands

and Other Texts: 1953–1974, Cambridge: Semiotext(e), pp. 170–192.
Hasty, Christopher (1997) Meter as Rhythm. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Hulse and Nesbitt (2010) Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and
Philosophy of Music, Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Straus, Joseph N. (1990) Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
Musicology after Deleuze: Response to Brian Hulse’s Review of Music

after Deleuze – All Music is ‘Deleuzian’
Brian Hulse concludes his review noting that ‘much remains to be done’.
On this we can agree and, in saying so, he hits pretty much the note on
which I conclude Music after Deleuze. Our disagreement concerns the
precise nature of what exactly has been done and what remains to be
done.
Hulse is committed to a retheorising of sound/music in the light
of Deleuzian thought and he expresses the desirability of recalibrating
Deleuze’s philosophy in relation to musical modernity. While I have
never equated Deleuzian philosophy with musical modernism, I do
not share his conviction that Deleuze’s relationship with modernity
is fundamentally problematic and, for me, Deleuze’s engagement with
non-musical modernism in Mallarmé, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Beckett and
others is fertile soil from which important aspects of his philosophy arise
and develop. Deleuze’s engagement with musical modernism is part of
this larger picture. Consequently, I do not share Hulse’s premise that
‘A Thousand Plateaus makes a bit of a mess in its glorification of the
modernists’. Given this starting point, we were never going to agree.
The Deleuzo-Guattarian focus on musical modernity is indeed a
tendency I have amplified in my book. This fact notwithstanding,
there is sufficiently extended discussion of and reference to other
repertoires (pre-modern Western art music, Gaelic psalm-singing,
Javanese gamelan, Indian scale systems, jazz improvisation and
experimental pop music) to indicate clearly that musical modernism and
Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy cannot be equated. What for Hulse is
merely ‘narrow’ is my attempt to deal with a relatively neglected field
of music (an extended musical modernism) with a certain thoroughness,
all the time trying to show that this repertoire in no way exhausts the
Deleuzian. A number of the composers and musicians discussed in the
book are not frequently cited in interdisciplinary studies and I have no
qualms in restating that their work qualifies as ‘minor’ in the Deleuzo-
Guattarian sense.
146 Reviews
Despite the attention given to musical modernism in A Thousand

Plateaus (1988), a clear irritation for Hulse, it is far from prominent
in most of the theoretical work of Deleuze’s interpreters. Most
commentators do not go beyond noting that certain key terms used
by Deleuze and Guattari have their origins in the work of Boulez
or Messiaen. The essays in the two excellent volumes, Buchanan and
Swiboda (2004) and Hulse and Nesbitt (2010), cover a range of
musical repertoires and experiences, including the modern, and this is
to be admired. While some previous authors have tackled aspects of
the engagement with musical modernity that is found in A Thousand
Plateaus, no study prior to Music after Deleuze has attempted to
show the impact of Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy on such a range
of contemporary musics/composers, and how this in turn directs us to
consider many other musics (historical and cultural).
While the decision not to deal with the critiques of Deleuze’s
engagement (you say ‘entanglement’, I say ‘engagement’) with Boulez’s
ideas (‘ideologies’ for Hulse) is judged a failing, I did not want the
book to become an exercise in firefighting, comprising largely polemical
discussions. Undoubtedly for Hulse and those of a like mind, this
omission will seem to ‘amplify’ problems and open the book to certain
charges. What should however be clear from my previous writing
on Boulez and musical modernism is that Hulse’s rather perfunctory
equation of serial and post-serial composition with structuralism is a
commonly held belief to which I do not subscribe. While Scherzinger’s
articles (2008; 2010) are interesting and insightful, I’m rather bemused
why anyone would find the lack of concordance in theory and practice
between Boulez and Deleuze in itself so troubling since Deleuze (and
Guattari) never profess to offer an orthodox reading of the authors
they use. Furthermore, it would have been problematic for me to cite
Scherzinger’s articles on Boulez without engaging in a more extended
critique of my own, which I judged would skew the trajectory I wished
to mark out. While I respect Scherzinger’s work, I am nevertheless not
at all persuaded that it delivers the blow to the Deleuzo-Guattarian
engagement with musical modernism Hulse seems to attribute to it. Nor
am I persuaded that the modernists have a monopoly on ideologically
motivated stances.
On the differences in use of terms (Boulez’s, as opposed to Deleuze
and Guattari’s), let me restate: Boulez’s smooth and striated spaces are
only the starting point for the mapping out of a Deleuzian politics of
musical spaces that is markedly different from Boulez’s much narrower
and purely technical use of terms. Similarly, while the pulsed and
the unpulsed are identified as Deleuze and Guattari’s most explicit
Reviews 147
engagement with musical time, the constellation of contemporary

conceptions of musical time presented in the book is much more varied
(e.g. Grisey’s outright dismissal of Boulez’s opposition; his multiplicitous
phenomenology of musical times and the practical irrelevance of the
non-pulsed for Carter) and once again cannot be reduced to Boulez’s
initial formulation or intention.
Concerning the chapter on difference, Hulse queries ‘if composers and
their scholarly interpreters think music through a principle of identity,
why allow this to pass uncontested?’ I do not believe I have done so. The
chapter opens with some examples from the perspectives of listening,
composition and performance that demonstrate fairly unambiguously
certain tendencies to approach music with a tacit principle of identity in
play. I included this short section with the explicit intention of making
clear to the reader what identity-thinking in a musical context might
be, and what follows in the remainder of the chapter is a response in
which multiple aspects of musical difference and Deleuzian repetition
are discussed. While I agree with Hulse that ‘there is no such thing as
identity thinking inherent to musical becoming’, the quotations from
Kurtág and Burnham, for example, show that not everyone shares our
Deleuzian sensibility.
Hulse perhaps understandably misunderstands my intent when he
states that I argue that “‘we cannot hope” to find conceptual
overlap between Deleuze and music as diverse as Beethoven and jazz
improvisation’. In this case, I think there is some ambiguity in my text.
The fact that I go on to discuss each of these musics in terms of Deleuzian
difference indicates that I am not arguing that Deleuzian philosophy has
nothing to say to us about these musics but rather that the connections
are not made explicitly by Deleuze and Guattari as they are in the case
of musical modernism. This is merely an observation, not a problem,
since Deleuze and Guattari do not address most of the music discussed
in my book. Furthermore, I am accused of merely ‘translating’ and not
‘rethinking’ musical categories. To take Hulse’s own priorities, does he
imagine that our sense of musical ‘becoming’ begins with Deleuze or that
thinking sound in a pre-musical way is only possible through a Deleuzian
lens? I agree completely with Hulse’s emphasis on the desirability of a
more general musical molecularity and the ‘dynamics of becoming’ that
are proposed, starting from the pre-musical. In Chapter 5 of the book,
however, where I discuss musical molecularity, I opted to highlight some
of what seemed (and seem) to me to be the most interesting experiments
in the work of recent modernist composers, but non-modernist and
non-Western examples could just as easily have been chosen. Deleuzian
molecularisation of material is clear in the repertoire I selected, but as
148 Reviews
others have argued previously, Hulse himself (2010) and Nesbitt (2010),
to take only two examples, all of musical history can be viewed as a
series of perpetual becomings. The philosophy of Deleuze is radical in
approach and, for better or worse, I believe that this radicality is shown
clearly but not exclusively in the experimental approaches highlighted in
the chapter. Hulse writes that ‘the question must remain how Deleuzian
thought applies to any music. All music “molecularises”, “deconstructs”
and “dissolves” itself.’ I am not so sure, subscribing as I do to the
Frankfurt School concepts of sedimentation and reification, as applicable
in the musical domain as elsewhere. While I agree wholeheartedly that
European modernism comprises only a small subset of music, not all
music is sufficiently molecular to relate in any meaningful way to the
spirit of what Deleuze and Guattari have in mind, though we do not have
to restrict ourselves to the subset of music that is musical modernism.
On the question of musical space, there is nothing of the Cartesian
about the terminological reduction of the multiplicity of musical spaces
to the interior and exterior. This abbreviated terminology simply
acknowledges that music can be conceptualised in a great number of
spatial senses and we need to be clear what exactly is being discussed.
No claim is made for the detachable reality of the pitch-space that
makes up the substance of the chapter; the claim is that this is the way
music has historically been thought of and that it needs to be addressed.
Hulse is quick to criticise terms that seem insufficiently defined yet he is
equally summary in describing ‘perception of sound’ as ‘the immanent
movement of actual-virtual becomings’, a description which I like but
which nevertheless raises equally problematic questions on the nature
of this movement. His judgement that ‘we do not perceive sounds in
terms of locational relationships with non-present sounds’ seems rather
dogmatic and limiting in prescribing unnecessary boundaries on the
workings of perception. I prefer to maintain the possibility of a number
of equally valid models of musical perception (including the spatial).
The reduction of the discussion of musical space to a complete theory
of listening which would be no more than ‘the idea of hopping around
a pre-given striated space’, is merely glib, reflects Hulse’s very different
preoccupations, and does little to address the actual content of the chap-
ter. At no point are smooth and striated spaces (as described in the book)
taken for the whole musical fact and their partiality is acknowledged.
Hulse is mistaken in imagining that Boulezian/Deleuzian concepts of
pitch space, or my discussion of them, have their origin in the work of
certain modernist American composers or theorists. Interesting though
that particular discussion might be, the concerns of North American
Reviews 149
theorists were of much less interest to me than the speculations and

experiments of Helmholtz, Ellis, Wyschnegradsky, Partch (a North
American) and certain ethnomusicologists (again North American),
none of whom needed to wait for Babbitt or the theorists who came
after him. Hulse’s invocation of Deleuze’s essay ‘How Do We Recognise
Structuralism?’ is valuable indeed and may be right that in engaging with
the concept of pitch space, as envisaged by the authors whose work is
discussed in the chapter, I have run the risk of being seen to ‘confirm
music theory’s structuralist pitch space’. While, I repeat, I admire Hulse’s
alternative preference, to theorise sound as becoming and the refusal
of parameterisation, his own approach likewise can only deliver partial
insight. Parameterisation is not new to modernism though modernity
broadens the range of parameters under consideration. Ultimately, while
Hulse wishes us to rethink sound (and I am not persuaded that what is
suggested really is such a radical rethink), the chapter on space while
operating a reduction (the independence of something called pitch)
nevertheless provides a way of engaging with a range of historic and
current musics (not just modernism) while also laying out a musical
politics that is not exported from without but which is intrinsic to
developing and competing conceptions of pitch. Deleuzian philosophy
offers us a way of gathering up what previously existed as fragmented
compositional or musicological insights into competing views of the
world from the perspective of sound.
We disagree fundamentally on the importance of the pulsed and
unpulsed in relation to time. Hulse has a different view but I again sense
a certain dogmatism in refusing this alternative view as ‘simplistic’. The
skeletal outline of the argument presented in the review is a caricature of
what is set out in the chapter where the impossibility of escaping pulse
is acknowledged clearly as is the de facto nature of the smooth and the
striated that appear in mixed ways.
While the chapter sets out from the explicit connection made by
Deleuze and Guattari with the smooth and the striated, the pulsed and
the unpulsed in relation to time, Hulse is correct in recognising that the
account takes A Thousand Plateaus as an important point of reference.
My account also draws on Deleuze’s two interventions at Institut de
Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique [IRCAM] (2006) and
an admittedly limited attempt is made to show how Deleuze’s pulsed
and non-pulsed times work in relation to the three passive syntheses of
Difference and Repetition as well as Chronos and Aion of The Logic
of Sense. The conclusion drawn ultimately is that ‘Deleuze’s temporal
theory may offer a philosophical gathering up of multiple possibilities
150 Reviews
or better, a temporal virtuality from which innumerable experiences of

time are actualized’ (Campbell 2013: 129). While Hulse is correct in
highlighting that the discussion again privileges ‘contemporary Western
art music’, the argument could easily have been expanded with equally
interesting examples from the music of other traditions. While musical
modernism has its ideological substructure, it is not the hermetically
sealed, technocratic force that Hulse suggests. The modernist
preoccupation with alternative times and temporalities is not only
related to philosophical and theological notions of time but also draws
explicitly on the musical temporalities of Asian and African cultures, an
aspect in the reception of this music which is all too rarely noted.
It is clearly the case that a different starting point selected from
Deleuze’s writings on musical time would result in a different narrative
but Hulse assumes the mantle of the professor who chides the student
for not replicating the essay he himself would have written. Hulse’s
putative starting point is a valuable one and, had I been producing a
book length study on Deleuze and musical time, I would undoubtedly
have considered a much wider range of music and musicological
comment including Hasty’s excellent contribution (2010). The focus on
modernism from Wagner and Brahms to Grisey that I have presented
in this chapter does not imply any denigration of other musics and
their temporalities but is intended to explore what I, along with Deleuze
and Guattari, perceive as connections of particular importance and with
multiple resonances. It goes without saying that many other musical
traditions or genres could be selected for discussion here.
That Hulse is offering a more radical Deleuze is not immediately
evident. Ultimately, the admirable inclusiveness he aspires to runs the
risk of opening up a new structuralist musicology where ‘the affirmation
of musical styles of innumerable traditions’ becomes simply a token of
whatever it is that ‘music is’. Of course, music is whole. We do not
need Deleuze or his interpreters to discover this. Boris de Schloezer,
as phenomenologist, pointed this out in ‘Retour à Descartes’ (1955)
where he took issue with the analytical tendency of Boulez, Fano and
Barraqué to dissolve the musical work into its specific elements. For
Schloezer, such an approach is a ‘truncated’ one that fails to engage
with ‘musical reality’. To dissect a work into its component parts, as
Boulez does in his rhythmic analysis of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, is
to deal with abstractions and not with the ‘thing itself’ which is the
musical event in all of its dimensions (Campbell 2010: 20). At the risk of
incurring further displeasure, let me state that the artificial division of the
musical fact into individual parameters served to break the hegemony
Reviews 151
of melody, harmony and rhythm, hitherto supreme in the conception

and study of Western music. Hierarchy and parameterisation did not
begin with modernism, nor did its rejection. It was amongst other factors
the rejection of the parametric approach of the modernists that led
composers and theorists to again consider the musical fact as a unified
whole grasped by perception.
Hulse’s charges – that I ‘claim a kind of autonomous existence
for music outside of perception’; that ‘Campbell affirms Schloezer’s
assertion that music’s existence is “independent of our apprehension, our
mental states and of whatever physiological and psychological processes
it may elicit within us”’ (Campbell 2013: 108); and that this ‘clearly
functions as a point of orientation for Campbell’s view of music as a
disembodied presence of a self-sufficient object prior to the engagement
and participation of a listener’ – are completely unfounded. Schloezer’s
views on musical time are cited in a section which is no more than a
digest of responses to Bergson’s durée and which is intended to provide
a broader context for the non-specialist reader. Since Deleuze is the
focus of the discussion, I did not attempt to address directly the views
of Bergson, Marcel, Koechlin, Schloezer, Bachelard, Souvtchinsky or,
for that matter, Husserl and Whitehead, but simply presented them in
relation to one another as showing that there already was a rich debate
before the arrival of Deleuze and Guattari on the scene. I did not remove
the question of musical temporality from the realm of experience and
perception but I did attempt to show that in Deleuze and Guattari, in
distinction to Husserl, ‘intentionality, intuition and the operation of the
reduced, phenomenological subject are no longer found’ (130).
Ultimately, the statement that ‘All Music is “Deleuzian”’ seems on
a par with saying that ‘All Philosophy is “Deleuzian”’. While clearly
not all philosophy is Deleuzian, we could presumably discuss any other
philosophy in relation to Deleuze’s work with the result that some
philosophies would appear more Deleuzian (related to Deleuze/in the
spirit of Deleuze) than others. Equally, we could discuss Deleuzian phi-
losophy in relation to all music. While Deleuze’s philosophy can reveal
aspects of all music previously overlooked by listeners, performers,
composers and scholars, this does not suggest to me that all repertoires
embody to an equal degree the radical spirit of Deleuzo-Guattarian
philosophy, but there once again, I suspect we are destined to differ.
Edward Campbell
University of Aberdeen, Scotland
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2015.0178
152 Reviews
References
Buchanan Ian and Marcel Swiboda (eds) (2004) Deleuze and Music, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Campbell, Edward (2010) Boulez, Music and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Campbell, Edward (2013) Music after Deleuze, London: Bloomsbury.
Deleuze, Gilles (2006) Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975– 1995,
ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, Boston, MA: MIT
Press, Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, Gilles Félix Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone.
Hasty, Christopher (2010) ‘The Image of Thought and Ideas of Music’, in Sounding
the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, Surrey:
Ashgate, pp. 1–22.
Hulse, Brian (2010) ‘Thinking Musical Difference: Music Theory as Minor Science’,
in Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt (eds), Sounding the Virtual, Surrey: Ashgate, pp.
23–50.
Hulse, Brian and Nick Nesbitt (eds) (2010) Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and
the Theory and Philosophy of Music, Surrey: Ashgate.
Nesbitt, Nick (2010) ‘Critique and Clinique: From Sounding Bodies to the Musical
Event’, in Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt (eds), Sounding the Virtual, Surrey:
Ashgate, pp. 159–79.
Scherzinger, Martin (2008) ‘Musical Modernism in the Thought of “Mille
Plateaux,” and Its Twofold Politics’, Perspectives of New Music, 46/2, pp.
130–58.
Scherzinger, Martin (2010) ‘Enforced Deterritorialisation, or the Trouble with
Musical Politics’, in Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt (eds), Sounding the Virtual,
Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 103–28.

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Libidinal Symptomatology in Deleuze’s

Masochism – Coldness and Cruelty

Erika Gaudlitz Federation University Australia

Keywords: libidinal symptomatology, masochism, de-oedipalisation

Deleuze Studies 9.1 (2015): 1–24

I. Introduction – Deleuze Engaging with Masoch

The Aims of My Project

instantiates the triadic schizoanalytic process as set out in Deleuze and

Extracting Libidinal Principles

demonstrate a libidinal intensity symptomatic of the flux of desire;

II. Observations – Masoch’s Literary Practice

A balanced critical-clinical appraisal affords a rescue of Masoch’s

aesthetic. The schizoanalytic core presents itself in the persona of the

The Ethnographic Intent

The Erotic Intent

Naming Masoch’s bodily techniques as masochism ignores the blend

The Law of the Mother

speculative hypotheses on masochism22 offering supplementary roads

III. Extraction – Masoch’s Libidinal Principles

rather than clinically isolating the corporeal symptoms of masochism

Imperatives and Libidinal Contracts

remittance the denial of vengeance and reprisal (Deleuze 2006: 220,

Fetishism and Disguise

The abolition of gendered roles eventuates as a game of roles, practices

Rituals and Language Games

unconscious whereby thanatos presents silence, the nothing, the void,

Art, Contract and Ritual, Law

represents a woman in the act of observed self-reflection, mirroring

aspect of masochism in Masoch’s notion of culturalism (Deleuze 2006:

look ridiculous. The contract is revealed as a deliberate caricature, a

IV. Instantiation – Deleuze Enacting the Schizoanalytic Process

The Critical-Clinical as a Semiotics

Deleuzian Libidinal Symptomatology

The masochist journey of liberation takes the schizoanalytic road

Evaluating Schizoanalysis – Revisited

mode of an anoedipal unconscious since we observe the processes of a

33. The three stages of schizoanalytic de-oedipalisation are punctuated by the

Buydens, Mireille [1990] (2005) Sahara: L’esthétique de Gilles Deleuze, Lettre-

Freud, Sigmund [1919] (1953–75) ‘ “A Child is Being Beaten”: A Contribution to

Michael James Bennett McMaster University

Cicero’s De Fato is one of Deleuze’s principal sources for the theory

in which paradox is the necessary genetic condition of sense. Once

I. Context: Stoic Causality

According to the mainstream interpretations of Stoic ontology,

in Stoic usage the Greek language equivalent to our ‘subsist’ [huphistasthai]

The Stoics understand causality in terms of the ontological divergence

II. Deleuze’s Paradoxical Sense–Events

How should we construe this emphatic statement? First of all, why

A. A. Long proposes that the difference between a complete and

that a proposition becomes true when it ‘obtains’ or ‘is actualised’

of meaning.5 Deleuze also associates Meinong and the Stoics (Deleuze

Deleuze’s challenge is to investigate the real conditions of experience,

[In denotation or signification] one is perpetually referred from the

unconditioned element of truth really generates the other dimensions of

Cicero recounts that Chrysippus responded to this argument by

A first body, say a scalpel, is a cause to a second body, some flesh, of

effect of ‘being in pain’.10 Being a ‘causal occurrent’ in this sense is

One way of understanding Deleuze’s emphasis on quasi-causality is

The contribution of ‘causal occurrents’ to the Stoic conception of

IV. Deleuze and Cicero’s De Fato

Deleuze’s First Claim: Chrysippean Compatibilism Means the

causal series should be understood in terms of Chrysippus’ much-

identifies necessity with relations among bodies, and (what we call)

that a jewel’s becoming broken would be Chrysippean-impossible if it