Van Gogh, “Wheat Field with Crows”
If ‘turning toward’ is the movement of thought toward truth, how could truth not also turn toward thought? And how could truth itself not turn away from thought when thought turns away from it? However, this is not a fusion but a reversibility, an immediate, perpetual, instantaneous exchange-a lightning flash.(What Is Philosophy, pp. 37-38)
Coming as such is non-going and going as such is non-coming. Insofar as immanence or infinite movement is defined by a coming and going, it is defined by the simultaneity or interdependent constitution of non-going and non-coming. Neither is absent the other, but neither is or can be if the other is present. Even if the distinction of coming and going is included in immanence, coming must be non-going if it is not to be going and going must be non-coming if it is not to be coming. Non-going (coming) and non-coming (going), by mutually absenting one another, doubly affirm “[...] the absence of the absence that is the absence of presence” (The Tenth Man, p. 163).
The resultant non-duality of absence is non-two, the virtual consistency of the chaotic virtual: “The plane of immanence is like a section of chaos and acts like a sieve. In fact, chaos is characterized less by the absence of determinations than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish. This is not a movement from one determination to the other but, on the contrary, the impossibility of a connection between them, since one does not appear without the other having already disappeared, and one appears as disappearance when the other disappears as outline. Chaos is not an inert or stationary state, nor is it a chance mixture. Chaos makes chaotic and undoes every consistency in the infinite” (What Is Philosophy, p. 42).
Philosophy gives consistency to chaos through the impossibility of a connection between two determinations and not by, impossibly, surmounting that impossibility. The two determinations, each of which is the absence of the other, mutually cancel one another out. Put simply, consistency consists in chaos canceling itself out through its non-contemporaneity with itself. The plane of immanence can be said to work like a sieve as a section of chaos because it retains the non-contemporaneity of chaos with itself, in which chaos is cancelled without anything of the infinite being lost.
“Movement of the infinite does not refer to spatiotemporal coordinates that define the successive positions of a moving object and the fixed reference points in relation to which these positions vary. ‘To orientate oneself in thought’ implies neither objective reference point nor moving object that experiences itself as a subject and that, as such, strives for or needs the infinite.” (What Is Philosophy, pp. 37-38)
The mutual cancellation of non-going (coming) and non-coming (going) – the two non-contemporaneous determinations – does not resolve non-contemporaneity in absence, but retains it as the absence of the absence that presence implies: the event seen to come and already past in a dead time without present. Absolute immanence is the mutuality of non-duality (non-two), the simultaneous absence of non-going and non-coming in the infinite now of becoming.
“Infinite movement is defined by a coming and going, because it does not advance toward a destination without already turning back on itself, the needle also being the pole.” (What Is Philosophy, pp. 37-38)
The presence of each is nothing besides the absence of the other, just as the absence of the other is nothing besides the absence of the absence of both. This is why n-1 is the subtraction of duality, which Deleuze and Guattari rightly call the one. The one is duality because the one is always and of necessity the other of the one. Duality is maintained as the absence of the one – the other of the one - which stands in for the absence of the absence of both the one and the other as both the one and the other. The one redoubles itself, doing “double duty,” which is why the double – infinite movement – is the subtraction of the duality of the one. Non-going and non-coming can be mutually absent because infinite movement – being non-two – is never even one. The one must be subtracted on both sides, which amounts to saying that the movement of its displacement or redoubling has to be anticipated. Infinite movement is infinite precisely because it is the absence of the absence of movement. The absolute absence of immanence in no way implies the presence of movement because the presence of movement implies the absence of movement.
“Movement takes in everything, and there is no place for a subject and an object that can only be concepts. It is the horizon itself that is in movement: the relative horizon recedes when the subject advances, but on the plane of immanence we are always and already on the absolute horizon.” (What Is Philosophy, pp. 37-38)
Only at the point where non-going and non-coming simultaneously cancel each other out can there be no interruption of movement – a coming and going - and therefore no eruption of the illusion of transcendence. We emphasize that movement is a coming and going to show that even if non-going and non-coming were construed as the presence of movement, the presence of movement would rest upon the absence of movement. In other words, infinite movement, which consists in a coming and going, would be interrupted by both coming (non-going) and going (non-coming). If movement is not to rest on its absence and immanence is not to rest on transcendence, movement (which has taken in everything) must become the simultaneous absence of its absence as non-going and its absence as non-coming. Transcendental empiricism consists in subtracting “both” from the “and” that Deleuze implicates, with an eye to Maurice Blanchot, as “[...] the force of ‘dispersal of the Outside’” (Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 174). In this way, the “and” or force of dispersal becomes constitutive, enabling the conversion of the most distant – the not-external outside – into the most deep – the not-internal inside.
“Infinite movement is double, and there is only a fold from one to the other.” (What Is Philosophy, pp. 37-38)
The lesson of topological conversion (the constitutive “and”) is that “non-two” must be shown doubly. Its singularity consists in nothing else.
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Should I stay or should I go? It seems to me that coming would not be “non-going”. Because isn’t non-going…just standing still?
That is my fav Van Gogh by the way…saw it a few years ago in his Amsterdam museum. I carried that print all over Europe, rolled up in my backpack. Did you know it was the last painting he did before committing suicide. That used to creep me out sometimes when I stared at it on my bedroom wall.