I’ve got some great books lined up to talk about this summer, and I’m hoping to get this blog a little stimulated with some new pieces a little bit more often. First on the list, I managed to fly my way through Todd May’s Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction. And with that, we dive into the problem, not merely the question, of how might one live.

How many of us open the door to the possibility that, however it is we are living, however it may be that we are existing, we might live otherwise? How might one live is not a matter of prescription or predetermination, instead, it is a matter of experimentation.

Spinoza said, “We do not even know of what a body is capable.” For Deleuze (and Spinoza), philosophy has moved beyond the questions of “how should one live?” and “how should one act?”, questions that seek answers and solutions to the problem of living and the problem of ontology, or what there is. For those antiquated questions, it matters what the whole of your life looks like; it matters whether one is acting in the right way, the good way; it matters whether one is fulfilling their duties, one’s obligations. But for the question of how might one live, those solutions and those answers are not nearly as important as the problem of living, of being; it matters instead to experiment and explore, to find the curious and, for Deleuze, the more important questions that might lead us to living differently.

First, I want to spend a little time breaking down this question of how might one live. Let’s focus on the “might”. For many postmodern thinkers, ontology has often been seen as a issue of rejection, a problem not worth seeking answers for. Minds like Foucault and Derrida reject ontology as a means of escaping the rigid categories and identities that an ontology of representation presents. But Deleuze seeks to work around that by creating his own ontology, by providing us with a framework with which to do ontological thinking outside of the boxes and containers of representative thought, identity, and transcendence. He wants to find a way to escape the restraints of subjectivity, to envision a universe composed not solely of predictable and neatly defined relationships and entities, but also of overflows and destabilizing pathways, of things that carry the weight of difference, of the things that might be, might become.

Far from being determined by immobile, “anthropological constraints”, we are instead molded by historical and political forces that can be modified, changed, perhaps even overthrown. The problem – the philosophical problem – is that we fail to recognize the historical character of these constraints, and so fail to recognize the freedom before us. Todd May Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction p11

In this endeavor of discovering the underlying sea of matter and time that dictates how we might live, we must remind ourselves of a past lesson from Deleuze. Philosophy does not settle things, it disturbs them. It is the art of concept creation. These concepts, far from being able to fully capture what it is they represent, palpate what is there rather than identify it. This act of palpating the fluid and porous substance of what exists is where we come back to the “one” in the question of “how might one live”. By rejecting transcendence, Deleuze adopts Spinoza’s thinking of a single substance, one being, one becoming. Mind and body are one; there is no transcendent substance that rests above any other substance. “What there is is difference itself, a pure difference that forms the soil for all identities, all distinctions, and all negations. The task of philosophy is to create concepts for difference” (May 21). With an ontology of immanence, of difference rather than identity, we are liberated from a hierarchical being, no longer resembling, copying, or obeying that which is transcendent. We are no longer bound by how we should live or what we must do. We, or rather, all existence, all substance, is difference in and of itself. Deleuze explains that “difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing” (Difference and Repetition p57).

This difference is not a difference in degree, of things that differ, but a difference of kind, what Deleuze often calls multiplicity. Here, difference is not a thing or a quality, it is a process. “It unfolds – or better, it is an unfolding (and a folding, and a refolding). It is alive. Not with cells or respiration, but with vitality” (May 24). From this, we see how living is not merely humanistic, it is not confined to ourselves or what we experience; living is a field of difference that is expressed through an experimentation of being, seemingly predictable (categorical, identifiable, re-presentable), but nevertheless unpredictable. The mistake, May points out, “was to believe that there was only one, and that it was the human one” (24). How one might live is both a gesture to the multiplicity of being as well as an embrace of the oneness and immanent substance of that which exists.

Let’s do a quick review. Remember that time is not a container that exists outside of what is (recall Einstein’s space-time); it is not transcendent to the folding, unfolding, and refolding of life. “Rather, it is something that is lived first, and only afterwards given linear form. The latter is built on the former, not the other way around” (May 42). The present contains all there is, both past and future; however, the present does not define the past nor the future, but instead it is defined by them. The past is virtual, it exists of the same substance as the present, but its expression is that of an immersion into history, a virtual field of differences that may be actualized into the present at every moment. The past exists within you as you exist, and it appears at each moment that you engage with the world. It is through this engagement that the virtual is actualized into the present. Through action, memory, perception, and experience, all events happen through the mingling of the past and the present; the past folds, unfolds, and refolds like origami paper, the present creates and invents new combinations from the past.

The past is lived in the present through the actualization of the virtual. If the present is the actualized difference of the past, then the future is the return of difference (more on that soon). The present, then, has a certain thickness, a texture from which the real is actualized through the virtual. This thickness is what Deleuze borrows from Bergson, the concept of duration. Duration is a virtual multiplicity, a sea of difference that is both actualized in the present and is of the present that it actualizes. This, again, is where we may find how might one live.

There is always more than presents itself, a surplus beyond what is directly experienced. That surplus is not not another fixed identity, a “something else”, but the virtuality of difference with no identity and all measure of potential. (May 55)

We are searching for what evades the capture of our neatly defined identities and categories. There is always more than what we perceive or experience. The concept of difference seeks to palpate that which eludes the capture of identity and representation. It is temporal, ever-changing, always becoming different from itself.

The present is more than simply an ideal Now, cut off from past and future. Rather, it is a realm of spatial presence, of relatively fixed identities and of differences in degree [rather than of kind], suffused by a past that both contributes to those identities and helps to undercut them, to unsettle them in ways that allow for expressions other than the ones that appear at a given moment in experience. The past does not trail the present, but is intimate with it. We do not move from present to past but from past to present. But what about the future? (May 56-57)

For the future, Deleuze turns to Nietzsche’s eternal return. The eternal return is not the recurrence of the same, of what already is, it is the recurrence of difference itself, of the overflowing duration from which repetition occurs. Recall that repetition is not the same thing repeated, instead it is the difference that is returned to the present as a chance and necessity. Nietzsche demonstrates this in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra with a simple game of dice.

“The game has two moments which are those of a dice throw – the dice that is thrown and the dice that falls back… The dice which are thrown once are the affirmation of chance, the combination which they form on falling is the affirmation of necessity (May 62). Chance demonstrates the probability of events to occur, the unknowing, uncertain expression of what might happen. Necessity demonstrates the inevitability of the event, the appearance of it being actualized in the present moment. The necessity that things happen.

The dice are thrown. This is the eternal return. The dice are always thrown, at every instant, at every moment. The future is always with us, here and now, just as the past is. A pair of dice, loaded with the multiplicity that is duration, are thrown. The dice fall back. They show a combination. There you have it. Those are the numbers. That is your throw. You may get another, but it will not erase the combination that faces you. That combination will always have happened, and will always be a part of your score. The past is always a part of every present. (May 64)

May continues, explaining the qualities of a good and a bad player in this game of living. Bad players get upset at the dice they roll. They reject the results or ignore them, or let them haunt their present and place limitations on their future. Bad players fail to affirm the chance and necessity of living.

Good players play for the sake of playing. They do not expect anything of the universe. It does not owe them anything. “It is headed nowhere in particular and they have no role to play in it. The universe gives what it gives” (May 65). Good players seek to affirm what exists, both virtual and actual, past and future within the living present. They throw the dice with abandon, without the restraints of transcendence, representation, or how one should live or act.

To affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives. To affirm is to experiment, without any assurances about the results of one’s experimenting. It is to explore the virtual, rather than cling to the actual. It is to ask with one’s life the question of how one might live. (May 65)

The future is most uncertain. The past is undeniably relentless in what it might present us. One throws the dice, but does not know what will fall back. Repetition, the eternal return, affirms the difference of creation, allowing new combinations, new foldings, unfoldings, and refoldings to occur. With each repetition there exists another affirmation of something new, something continually becoming different from itself. What is present to us is never all there is. There is always more to any presentation. Identity, what is re-presented, is a spatial and limited expression of thought. By thinking temporally, the texture, the thickness of the present becomes recognizable as what there is. “The present always holds more than it seems. It is pregnant with its past, which also holds the future” (May 70).

To affirm is to create, to experiment, to seek the limits of whatever is capable by actualizing the virtual. By embracing the chance of the future and the necessity of its nature, one can affirm the multiplicity that arises at every moment in the duration of being. By finding new connections, new expressions, one can move beyond the established boundaries, limitations, and transcendent being that works to inhibit the creativity and exploration of the unknown, the undiscovered, and the unrealized capabilities of living.

By asking “How might one live?“, we recognize the virtuality and duration of living and realize that all things that exist live and might live in unexpected and exciting ways. There is only one time, but there is always more. As Spinoza said, “We do not even know of what a body is capable.”

Next time, we’ll dive into how language is intimately engaged with this battle between difference and identity. But for now, thanks for reading.