Baudrillard and Heidegger in the past

Baudrillard and Heidegger, 2

Fast forward from the material governing the previous post, to May of 1999, to what amounts, in other words, to a thirty year jump. We are near the end of Baudrillard's career now rather than its beginning, and Baudrillard is doing a series of Wellek lectures at the University of California, Irvine. In the third lecture, entitled the "Murder of the Real," Baudrillard rehearses a theme that has been more or less a constant to his work since The Perfect Crime, namely that reality has died, been ex-terminated, and has not and never will be resurrected. Indeed, it's corpse may never even be found. He notes:

For reality is but a concept, or a principle, and by reality I mean the whole system of values connected with this principle. The Real as such implies an origin, an end, a past and a future, a chain of causes and effects, a continuity and a rationality. No real without these elements, without an objective configuration of discourse. And its disappearing is the dislocation of this whole constellation.
This argument is bound up, for Baudrillard, with virtualization and virtual reality, and a critique of new information technology. I have never been particularly convinced by his critiques of these technologies, but I do find the cultural inference he draws from them to be accurate; in other words, whether virtual reality itself does anything to dissolve the real, the discursive field that enables something like the term "virtual reality" is evidence already that the dissolution has taken place, that it has become susceptible to qualification, subdivision, and hyper-realization.

This collapse of reality is an argument for which Baudrillard is particularly well known, but it will come as no surprise that the Heidegger of Being and Time is also dedicated to a dissolution of the metaphysical reality principle, though his reasons for thinking this dissolution are far more subjectal in orientation (again, at least that's the case back in 1927).

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I fall on the bias

The burning issue with philosophers is not between philosophy and rhetorics (for a philosopher, philosophy always wins this game), but between Platonists and Aristotelians and thence, to complicate the symmetry, between Aristotelians and the Social Sciences and heidegerrians and analytic philosophy and so on... As usual, I fell on the bias across the controversies of this kind.

As you know, this propensity to situate my arguments across seeming dichotomies marks my work in every texty i wrote. Pragmatists and idealists; Marxists and esthetes; urban radicals and agrarian conservatives; psychological and sociological theorists: i would continuously take a position that fell on the bias — not simply in the middle, not finding some common ground between them in a weak compromise, but cutting across their positions, envisioning an alternative...

Jean-Philippe Pastor

Difference in itself

Still, despite Deleuze's distancing from creative evolution, something substantial persists across his changing relation to both Bergson and biology.

Namely, his commitment to a notion of internal difference, or difference in itself. This commitment motivates Deleuze's initial adherence to Bergson's creative evolutionism no less than his later "break" with Bergson over the status of intensity as well as the correlated model of creative involution he develops together with Guattari. The initial impetus driving Deleuze's effort to rehabilitate the fraught notion of the elan vital and with it, the very career of Bergson as philosopher, was nothing other than the notion of internal difference. As he reconstructs it in his 1956 essay, "Bergson's Conception of Difference," and then again in his 1966 Bergsonism, the elan vital introduces an explosive force internal to the process of evolution (internal difference) that is capable of accounting for the positive power of time as a source of creative invention. With the progress of his own
philosophical career, Deleuze soon found reason to temper his initial adherence to Bergsonism--and specifically, to Bergson's
derivation of internal difference from qualitative difference--without in any way abandoning his own commitment to
internal difference.

As early as Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze traces qualitative difference or difference in kind (together with quantitative difference or difference in degree) to a fluid continuum of intensity, thereby eschewing Bergson's argument that qualitative difference is itself one of two tendencies being differentiated and thus, a tendency internal to difference that, as Deleuze puts it, "show[s] the way in which a thing varies qualitatively in time".

voir http://www.situation.ru/app/index.htm

Always changing

A society is a collection of individuals. It can be organized in a variety of different ways, and is always changing. A static society is virtually impossible, because its composition of unique individuals is always changing. Just like the atoms and molecules in our bodies are always changing - but always organized by our genes and certain processes into this thing we call "self.

Now, for the short time each of us exists, we are a unique, but dynamic collection of "hardware" and "software." Not only are the information, value and belief systems we hold constantly changing; the body and brain themselves are constantly changing. This is partly due to aging, partly due to stress, happiness and a variety of other factors we are only beginning to understand - and many others we may never understand.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

- Jean-Philippe Pastor

Vital difference

It is precisely this realism and the biological basis of differentiation that Deleuze eschews in his effort to arrive at a (philosophical) principle of difference in itself.

The roots of such a principle--a principle that will underwrite both Deleuze's philosophical Aufhebung of biology in Difference and Repetition and D+G's marginalization of the organism in A Thousand Plateaus--can be found in Deleuze's interpretation of vital difference as internal difference in Bergsonism.

Introduced in the context of an effort to distinguish Bergsonian creative evolution from Darwinism, this interpretation foregrounds Bergson's stress on the indeterminacy of vital
difference in order to present the Elan vital as the ultimate and purely internal cause of differentiation above and beyond any resistance matter offers to life, and indeed in place of
such resistance. Before expressing itself as material differentiation, that is, the Elan vital differs from itself: it is difference in itself.

What this means is that vital difference is virtual and that expressed difference is the
actualization of virtual life.

from Mark Hansen
Princeton University

Changing concepts

Creation of Concepts

For Rawls: Indeterminate “ideas” (such as the rights of individual) inform the creation of “concepts” (such as Justice and Original Position), which allow for systematic “conceptions”; principles for deciding which concepts are arbitrary.

With Rawl’s constructivism, the content of the concept (for example Justice) is procedurally constructed not from historically loaded ideas, but as the outcome of a dialogue between ideas. This is definitely not the same as Deleuze.

Deleuze does not see the creation of concepts (i.e. Philosophy) as the result of a conversation. In “What is Philosophy” Deleuze describes a “horror” of discussions within Philosophy. This is his account of a ‘rhizome-book’ of movement in concepts (in Patton’s paper above).

Deleuze sees distinct concepts, but something “passes between them”. So internal consistency, but “exo-consistency” between changes. Source of mobility through these connections. ”Relations to concepts provide pathways to others”. This is linked to the plane of immanence, and the (changing) image of thought; searching for different image of thought. An account of “Becoming Just” contour configuration, constellation.

Patton sees the mobility provided by Deleuze as a useful awareness, thinks it is apparent that the creation of Justice is exemplary of Deleuze’s concept creation: Justice (Rawls) is a mobile concept (Deleuze). Conception of Justice becomes historical as “incremental conceptions”. ”Subject to assumption that firmly held convictions change”. Patton examines how Rawls was Looking at Justice as primary social concept, but focussed on Stability, as he wanted to say the Just was more stable. Through the forces between concepts, the one effected the other.

Conceptual personae

From What is Philosophy, by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari:

“The conceptual persona is not the philosopher’s representative but, rather, the reverse: the philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other personae who are the intercessors, the real subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosdopher’s “heteronyms,” and the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae.”

For Rawls; Rational, Citizens, and Reasonable.
For Deleuze: ”Friend of concept” (Nietzsche, Blanchot), set up to measure forces outside of philosophy . Future transformations. Becoming.

from http://blog.neonascent.net/

Joyful way of thinking

In psychoanalytic terms, Hegel’s ontology is fundamentally mournful, while Heidegger’s ontology is fundamentally melancholic.

Brent Adkins argues that the solution to this antinomy is found in Deleuze and Guatttari’s Anti-Oedipus, where they take us beyond the limits of mourning and melancholia by refusing both. The result is a new (joyful) way of thinking about death that does not require philosophy to be a constant meditation on death.

Deleuze believed that life is desire, and that there are two distinct ways of thinking about desire. The first is that we only desire because we lack something. The other is called productive desire, in that we desire to make new connections, not necessarily because we lack connections, but because we want to try something new. Deleuze would argue that Heidegger and Hegel would think that desires are based on a lack of something. Deleuze ultimately believed that life is not about living to fill a lack or a void, but rather to make connections. Because Deleuze conceived of desire as productive, his conception of death is joyful rather than mournful or melancholic.

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor