Translation from Gilles Deleuze’s Ontology: Véronique Bergen on the Syntheses of the Unconscious in Difference and Repetition

The following is an excerpt on the syntheses of the unconscious in Difference and Repetition from Véronique Bergen’s L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 325-327. Original translation by Taylor Adkins on 11/05/07.

The three syntheses of the unconscious in the times developed in Difference and Repetition, the three “beyonds of the pleasure principle”[1] organizing bio-psychic life

“correspond to figures of repetition, which appear in the work of a great novelist: the binding, the ever renewed fine cord; the every displaced stain on the wall; the ever erased eraser. The repetition-binding, the repetition-stain, the repetition-eraser: the three beyonds of the pleasure principle. The first synthesis expresses the foundation of time upon the basis of a living present, a foundation which endows pleasure with its value as a general empirical principle to which is subject the content of the psychic life in the Id. The second synthesis expresses the manner in which time is grounded in a pure past, a ground which conditions the application of the pleasure principle to the contents of the Ego. The third synthesis, however, refers to the absence of ground into which we are precipitated by the ground itself: Thanatos appears in third place as this groundlessness, beyond the ground of Eros and the foundation of Habit” (Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton, p. 114).

Translation: Véronique Bergen’s Diagram of the Evolution of Deleuzian Concepts

The following is a translation of a section containing a table of the evolutions of the names of the transcendental field and the operators of differenciating liaisons from L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze, Véronique Bergen. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 545-549.
Original translation by Taylor Adkins 11/05/07.

Translation: Michel Serres and the Mathematization of Empiricism

The following is a translation of Michel Serres’s essay “Mathematization of Empiricism.” from Hermes II: L’Interférence. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972. 195-200. Original translation by Taylor Adkins 11/03/07.

The law known as Fechner-Weber’s law can be written S = K log I, and read: sensation grows like the logarithm of the stimulus[1]. The definition of Information, in the contemporary sense, can be written I = K log P, and read: information grows like the logarithm of the number of equally probable states[2]. Can the analogy of formation result in thinking the analogy of the alleged phenomena?

1. The notion of information is used in physics and communication theory in a way independent from the sense of the message that transports it. A succession of letters forming a word deprived of sense for whomever contains an easily calculable quantity of information. This magnitude does not have any relation to knowledge, in its traditional meaning. It is independent of the sense of the message, it is it thus of the observer.

Translation: Two Entries from Francois Zourabichvili’s book on Deleuze’s Vocabulary: Univocity and Pre-Individual Singularities

The following are two entries from Francois Zourabichvili’s book La vocabulaire de Deleuze. Paris: Ellipses, 2003. Original Translation by Taylor Adkins 11/03/07.

Pre-individual Singularities

* We cannot accept the alternative which thoroughly compromises psychology, cosmology, and theology: either singularities already comprised in individuals and persons, or the undifferentiated abyss. Only when the world, teeming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental (LS 103).

Translation of Vision-in-One: Additional Definition to Laruelle’s Dictionary of Non-Philosophy

The following is an entry from Francois Laruelle’s Dictionnaire de la non-philosophie. Paris: Editions Kimé, 1998. Original translation by Sid Littlefield, 10/31/07.

Vision-in-One (One, One-in-One, Real)

Primary concept of non-philosophy, equivalent with “One-in-One” or the “Real.” What determines the theory of in-the-last-instance and the pragmatics of the Thought-World (“philosophy”). The vision-in-one is radically immanent and universal; it is the given-without-givenness of the givenness of the Thought-World.

Philosophy is the desire and oppression of the One, divisible or associated with division. The problematization of Being (Heidegger included) supposes this barred One without really thematizing it. Philosophies of the One (Plato, neo-Platonism, Lacan) suppose a final convertibility with Being based on the fact that Being is given a final objectivity, that is ordered by the criteria of Being or abstracted from them. All ‘thoughts of the One’ are still structured like that of metaphysics: They hold an ultimate bound between the metaphysics of the science of Being and the science of the One. Hence the necessary disqualification of the One of the Greek from its empirical component, the one of the count or counting (Badiou), a point of extreme conflict between Being and the One and the ‘death’ of the former. The philosophy that wishes to be post-metaphysical oscillates, in the best cases, between the end of Being and the end of the One, while never ceasing to honor metaphysics.

Non-philosophy enunciates a series of axioms on the One understood as vision-in-One and no longer as the desire of the One:

(1) The One is radical immanence, identity-without-transcendence, not associated with transcendence or division.

(2) The One is in-One or vision-in-One and not in-Being or in-Difference.

(3) The One is the Real in so far as it forecloses all symbolization (thought, knowledge, etc).

Translation: Six Entries from Francois Laruelle’s Dictionary of Non-Philosophy

Francois Laruelle’s project (from the following entries) can, in my opinion, be best related to the previous translations I have posted on Alain Badiou and Albert Lautman. Badiou’s concept of model as coupling (ideological/scientific)–like Laruelle’s coupling of philosophy/non-philosophy–and questions of logical formalism intersect well with Lautman’s discussion of Hilbert and metamathematics.

Although Laruelle specifically names Deleuze (in a negative way, moreover), his project seems to have the strongest correlation to Alain Badiou (especially some of the language like: philosophical decision, the One, philosophical faith, etc.). The strongest ties between these two figures is definitely the constant problem of locating and axiomatizing philosophy’s foundation (unlike Badiou, who goes to philosophy’s four conditions, Laruelle opts for an autonomous discipline–non-philosophy–which axiomatizes in philosophy’s place). As a contemporary (and possibly the most radical) thinker of the void, Laruelle asserts that philosophy must evacuate itself in order to found itself, and failing the former, non-philosophy continues the task of the foundation of philosophy (which necessarily cannot legitimate itself). Even the figure of St. Paul (Badiou’s ideal subject type) must craft a discourse that navigates beyond the discourses of Greek philosophy (proof and argument) and Jewish prophecy (interpretation of signs) in order to install itself in an apostolic discourse (which is a discourse of weakness, of ‘folly’, because it can never lay claim to the other discourse, i.e. the miraculous, which would propagate itself through a discourse of revelations and miracles). The apostolic discourse is (at least for Badiou) precisely this (non)founded discourse that will evacuate fidelity from the state of the situation, making it legitimate. (If not Deleuze and Guattari, Badiou and Guattari–Nomadology and Moses rebaptized as the ideal subject–the Wanderer and His Manna.)

The following are six selections or definitions from Francois Laruelle’s Dictionnaire de la non-philosophy. Pars: Editions Kimé, 1998. Original Translation by Taylor Adkins 10/24/07.

Translation: Jean-Hugues Barthélémy on Simondon, Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin

The following is the first half of chapter 1 from Jean-Hugues Barthélémy’s book Penser l’individuation: Simondon et la philosophie de la nature. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. p. 37-48. Original translation by Taylor Adkins on 10/22/07.

Chapter 1

The concept of object and the concept of subject, in the same virtue of their origin, are limits that philosophical thought must overcome. –Gilbert Simondon

1. Ontology and ontogenesis: from Bergson to Simondon

The philosophically fundamental watchword of all Simondian thought undoubtedly resides in the idea according to: the process of individuation cannot be ob-jectified by knowledge, since the former is produced by the latter if the knowledge of individuation is itself the individuation of knowledge. This is why the principal introduction of his thesis ends with these lines:

We cannot, in the usual sense of the term, know the individuation; we can only individuate, individuate ourselves, and individuate in ourselves; this seizure is thus, in the margin of knowledge properly stated, an analogy between two operations, which is a certain mode of communication. The individuation of the real exterior to the subject is seized by the subject thanks to the analogical individuation of knowledge in the subject; but it is through the individuation of knowledge and not by knowledge alone that the individuation of (non-subject) beings is seized. Beings can be known by the knowledge of the subject, but the individuation of beings can be seized only by the individuation of the knowledge of the subject.[1]

Translation: Simondon, Completion of Section I, Chapter 1, The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable,’ endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed. (Potential energy is the energy of the pure event, whereas forms of actualization correspond to the realization of the event). In the second place, singularities posses a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast. In the third place, singularities or potentials haunt the surface. Everything happens at the surface in a crystal which develops only on the edges. Undoubtedly, an organism is not developed in the same manner. An organism does not cease to contract in an interior space and to expand in an exterior space–to assimilate and to externalize. But membranes are no less important, for they carry potentials and regenerate polarities. They place internal and external spaces into contact without regard to distance. The internal and external, depth and height, have biological value only through this topological surface of contact. Thus, even biologically, it is necessary to understand that ‘the deepest is the skin.’ The skin has as its disposal a vital and properly superficial potential energy. And just as events do not occupy the surface but rather frequent it, superficial energy is not localized at the surface, but is rather bound to its formation. Gilbert Simondon has expressed this very well: the living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit… The characteristic polarity of life is at the level of the membrane; it is here that life exists in an essential manner, as an aspect of a dynamic topology which itself maintains the metastability by which it exists… The entire content of internal space is topologically in contact with the content of external space at the limits of the living; there is, in fact, no distance in topology; the entire mass of living matter contained in the internal space is actively present to the external world at the limit of the living… To belong to interiority does not mean only to ‘be inside,’ but to be on the ‘in-side’ of the limit… At the level of the polarized membrane, internal past and external future face one another. [Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia, 1990. p. 103-104.]

Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique (Paris: P.U.F., 1964), pp. 260-264. This entire book, it seems to us, has special importance, since it p

Translation: Alain Badiou and the Concept of the Model: Introduction to a Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics

The following is the first three sections of Alain Badiou’s first theoretical book Le Concept de modèle: introduction à une épistémologie matérialiste des mathématiques. Paris: Maspero, 1968. p. 7-17 and is an original translation by Taylor Adkins [10/17/07].

Editor’s Advertisement:

The beginning of this text continues a talk given on April 29, 1968 by Alain Badiou within the framework of the “Course of philosophy for scientists” given to the National university.

This continuation should have been the subject of a second exposition on May 13, 1968. This day, it is known, the popular masses mobilized against the middle-class Gaullist dictatorship affirming in all the country their determination, and enticing the process that led to a confrontation of classes on a great scale, upsetting the political economic situation, and causing effects whose continuation will not be made to wait.

It is often imagined that in this storm, the intervention on the philosophical front had to pass to a second plan.

This very day, the somewhat “theoretical” accents of this text return to a surpassed economic situation. The struggle, also ideological, requires a totally different style of labor and a just and lucid political combativeness. It is no longer a question of aiming at a target without reaching it.

Translation: Albert Lautman’s Essay on the Notions of Structure and Existence in Mathematics

We should speak of a dialectics of the calculus rather than a metaphysics. By “dialectic” we do not mean any kind of circulation of opposing representations which would make them coincide in the identity of a concept, but the problem element in so far as this may be distinguished from the properly mathematical element of solutions. Following Lautman’s general thesis, a problem has three aspects: its difference in kind from solutions; its transcendence in relation to the solutions that it engenders on the basis of its own determinant conditions; and its immanence in the solutions which cover it, the problem being the better resolved the more it is determined. Thus the ideal connections constitutive of the problematic (dialectical) Idea are incarnated in the real relations which are constituted by mathematical theories and carried over into problems in the form of solutions (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia, 1994. p. 178.).

Following Lautman and Vuillemin’s work on mathematics, ’structuralism’ seems to us the only means by which a genetic method can achieve its ambitions. It is sufficient to understand that the genesis takes place in time not between one actual term, however small, and another actual term, but between the virtual and its actualisation–in other words, it goes from the structure to the incarnation, from the conditions of a problem to the cases of solution, from the differential elements and their ideal connections to actual terms and diverse real relations which constitute at each moment the actuality of time. This is a genesis without dynamism, evolving necessarily in the element of a supra-historicity, a static genesis which may be understood as the correlate of the notion of passive synthesis, and which in turn illuminates that notion. Was not the mistake of the modern interpretation of calculus to condemn its genetic ambitions under the pretext of having discovered a ’structure’ which dissociated calculus from any phoronomic or dynamic considerations? There are Ideas which correspond to mathematical relations and realities, others which correspond to physical laws and facts. There are others which, according to their order, correspond to organisms, psychic structures, languages, and societies; their correspondences without resemblance are of a structural-genetic nature. Just as structure is independent of any principle of identity, so genesis is independent of a rule of resemblance. However, an Idea with all its adventures emerges in so far as it already satisfies certain structural and genetic conditions, and not others. The application of these criteria must therefore be sought in very different domains, by means of examples chosen almost at random (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia, 1994. p. 183-84.).

Translation: Michel Serres and the Eternal Return

The following is Michel Serres’s essay “Eternal Return” in Hermes IV: Distribution. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977. pp. 115-124. Original translation by Taylor Adkins on 10/10/07

Philosophers glorify Nietzsche for having suddenly rejoined the Greeks through their fulgurating intuition of the Eternal Return. Either from an ignorance of ethics or incomprehension of the general figure that this thesis takes in his philosophy, I reduce this to a vision of the world. Vision with the meaning of sight, and world with the sense of the world. All simply.

If time is considered in geometrical figures by optical interceptions and a mechanism of movements, the Eternal Return is cosmological. In that case, the solar system (and it only) has been calculated by Laplace. Celestial Mechanics and the Exposition of the System of the World established rigorously, for the first time, the mechanical invariability of the large axes for the planetary orbits. The stars turn forever. This eternal return reduces the world to the exclusion of the universe, and reduces mechanism to the exclusion of other sciences. Neither the Greeks nor the classical age ever obtained this demonstration. Conversely, the time that we consider is reversible.

If the time that one endorses is that of a formation, of bodies as spheres, and with which one tries to surpass mechanical reversibility, then, if there is return, it is cosmogonic. However, cosmogony enters science little by little around the middle of the 18^th century, with Thomas Wright and Buffon. If Laplace has erased the latter in the seventh note of the Exposition, the former has inspired Kant. Natural History and the Theory of the Sky marks the appearance of the Eternal Return in scientific cosmogony.

Translation: Francois Laruelle’s Beyond the Power Principle

The following is the preface from Francois Laruelle’s Beyond the Power Principle pp. 1-9 and is an original translation by Taylor Adkins 10/09/07.

Stylistic Caution

A: But if everyone knew this most would be harmed by it. You yourself call these opinions dangerous for those exposed to danger, and yet you express them in public?

B: I write in such a way that neither the mob, nor the populi, nor the parties of any kind want to read me. Consequently these opinions of mine will never become public.

A: But how do you write, then?

B: Neither usefully nor pleasantly–to the trio I have named.

–Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, 71.

Flowing, multiple and simulated… Power is the only recent philosophical object which is becoming interesting: fictionalized, televised, cinematized, moralized, philosophized, psychoanalyzed… it tolerates all the treatments and survives them. So many transversals have made it acquire plasticity and the capacity for a synthesis which grounds the great fetishes: it joins together in its definition all the meanings and contrary uses, it concentrates in itself contradictory political and ideological ambitions. Like the older terms of Existence or Structure, but with more facility because it expresses fewer theoretical requirements (on this point, it has not been demonstrated until now as being very difficult, and on this point it is not the recent philosophy which will contradict us), it has conquered the grand capitalist style: as a concept, its practical value is virtually null, it is rather its exchange value, to which it is reduced, that makes its only possible usage.

French Translations: Works in Progress

My last six posts have all been translations; they range from philosophy of science to paradigms for approaching and studying Nietzsche. I plan to continue working on translating Boudot’s work (including sections from three of his books on Nietzsche, featuring comparisons of Nietzsche with Bataille, Camus, and Bachelard); Ruyer’s work (Genesis of Living Forms, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, and The Paradoxes of Consciousness and the Limits of Automatism); Guattari’s work (Schizoanalytic Cartographies; The Machinic Unconscious; and Psychoanalysis and Transversality); Laruelle’s work (Nietzsche contra
Heidegger; Beyond the Power Principle); Badiou’s (early) work (Theory of the Subject; Of Ideology); Simondon’s work (The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis; Psychic and Collective Individuation; and
On the Mode of the Existence of Technical Objects); and Serres’s work (Hermes II, III, and IV; The Origins of Geometry).

Translation: Simondon and the Physico-Biological Genesis of the Individual

Simondon, Gilbert. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. Original Translation by Taylor Adkins.

Chapter One: Form and Matter

Section I—Foundations of the Hylemorphic Model: Technology of the Capture of Form

1. The Conditions of Individuation: pp. 27-39.

The notions of form and matter can help solve the problem of individuation only if they are first compared to its position. So if by the contrast it was discovered that the hylemorphic system expresses and contains the problem of individuation, it would be necessary, under pain of locking ourselves [sous peine de s'enfermer] into begging the question, to regard the research of the principle of individuation as logically anterior to the definition of matter and form.

It is difficult to consider the notions of form and matter as innate ideas. However, at the moment when one would be tempted to assign a technological origin to them, one is arrested by the remarkable capacity of generalization which these notions have. It is not only the clay and the brick, the marble and the statue which can be thought according to the hylemorphic model, but also a great number of formal, genetic and compositional actualities, in the living world and the psychic domain. The logical force of this model is such that Aristotle could use it to support a universal system of classification which applies itself to reality by following a logical path as well as a physical path, by ensuring the agreement of the logical order and the physical order, and by authorizing inductive knowledge. Even the ratio of the soul and the body can be thought according to the hylemorphic model.

Translation: Appendix to Boudot’s Reading in Nietzsche aujourd’hui: Round Table Discussion

Boudot, Pierre. “Discussion de la méthode dia-critique: une méthode de lecture de Zarathoustra.” Nietzsche aujourd’hui (2 vols.). Pierre Boudot et. alia. Publications du centre culturel de Cérisy-a-Salle (Paris: UGE, 1973),vol. 1, pp. 384-393..

This is the discussion following Pierre Boudot’s essay in the Nietzsche aujourd’hui volume translated by Taylor Adkins [9/28/07].

Robert Sasso: I am surprised to hear you presenting your lecture program without many references, some allusive, to works already devoted to readings of Nietzsche, his relations with other authors, the civilization of his time, for example, those of Andler or, more recently, of Morel. It is certainly not about ignorance, but a setting between brackets of which I would like to understand. In addition, when you propose a collective task, extremely vast moreover, how do you conceive the execution of it?

Translation: The Dia-critical Method: Pierre Boudot’s Method of Reading Zarathustra

Boudot, Pierre. “La méthode dia-critique: une méthode de lecture de Zarathoustra.” Nietzsche aujourd’hui (2 vols.). Pierre Boudot et. alia. Publications du centre culturel de Cérisy-a-Salle (Paris: UGE, 1973),vol. 1, pp. 371-383. Translated by Taylor Adkins [9/07].

The following is my translation of Pierre Boudot’s essay. The discussion following his essay in the Nietzsche aujourd’hui volume will also be translated at a later date with commentary.

At each moment of his thought, Nietzsche reactivates the reasons why he is Nietzsche, and pushes a little further, a little farther away, the fundamental concepts of his thought, while varying (almost without his knowledge) the contents in combination with the problems that occupy them. The basic Nietzschean concepts do not have the same direction according to whether one makes use of them to interpret The Birth of Tragedy or Human, All Too Human or to explain their specific sense. Thus any interrogation on Nietzsche must see whether these are concepts that vary by successive implicit definitions or if they alternate when words, apparently identical as for their phonemes, push in front of them a reality which deviates differently because it is transformed from the inside by the basic themes that Nietzsche himself proposes. If the basic concepts vary, it is in order to commit a series of misunderstandings which employ them according to the innovation of the automatically corresponding problem and clearly to the innovation of words which however would be pronounced and heard in the same way: eternal return, overman, nihilism, revaluation of values, will to power.

Translation: Introduction to Nietzsche’s Ontology: Pierre Boudot

Boudot, Pierre. L’ontologie de Nietzsche. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971.

The following is my translation of the introduction, pg. 5-9.

I like the total renewal of Nieztsche’s thought in each one of his books. Its creative requirement moves in a counter-current, but I consider it able to release to our time the individual sources of genius in the environment of humanity. If our society does not understand that, electronic machines will dictate the laws of writing to us before the end of the century. One who reads Nietzsche does not have to write about all his life in the same book. The freedom that this allows is stronger than its deficits. We are victims of dogmas, of doctrines, even of ideologies which impose an alleged evolution in its cumbersome immobility. On the other hand, those who understand the lesson of Nietzsche will not be “Nietzschean’; instead each of their creative acts will have to be considered different in kind from the preceding one. The painful alchemy of these disavowals forces us into silence, modifies our remarks or retains it without solidifying it, elaborating a glance which hates that which it skims over, which is from another age, not of a new time.

Translation: Raymond Ruyer and the Genesis of Living Forms

Ruyer, Raymond. La genése des formes vivantes. Paris: Flammarion, 1958.

The following is my translation of the introduction pg 5-9.

Morphology, the study of forms and their arrangements, does not present any fundamental difficulty. It needs more than precision and meticulousness. It requires, more frequently, indirect methods that demand a lot of ingenuity, like those methods that led to the structural diagrams of organic chemistry or to the genetic cartography of cellular nuclei. The results of these indirect methods are frequently followed by direct verifications. Photographs for crystalline research and negatives for electronic microscopes have made it necessary sometimes to see these structures before cleverly speculating on their nature. This proves that at least in principle, morphology is ‘easy’—in the very particular sense of the word in scientific research—easy, like a vision and a direct description.

In addition, in the science of forms, one escapes the unpleasant obligation to engage in philosophical subtleties on value and the possibility of knowledge. Eddington, in his last work[1], tells us which intellectual event represents for him the refutation of Bertrand Russell’s theory of the structural character of scientific knowledge. We could have avoided many philosophical speculations, Russell[2] says, if we had realized the importance of structure and the difficulty of going beyond it.