Sean Bowden

“Willing the Event”: Expressive Agency in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense

Abstract A major problem threatens Deleuze’s project in The Logic of Sense. He makes an ontological distinction between events and substances, but he then collapses a crucial distinction between two kinds of events, namely, actions and mere occurrences. Indeed, whereas actions are commonly differentiated from mere occurrences with reference to their causal dependence on the intentions of their agents, Deleuze asserts a strict ontological distinction between the realm of causes (including psychological causes) and the realm of events, and holds that events of all types are incorporeal happenings which are inseparable from expressed sense. For Deleuze, what counts as one’s action thus does not depend on one’s intention, but rather on a process of “making sense” of that action. Nevertheless, Deleuze continues to speak of the need to “will” the event. In order to resolve this apparent contradiction, I will read a conception of “expressive agency” into The Logic of Sense.

Human and Nonhuman Agency in Deleuze

The concept of agency in Deleuze’s work has received no small amount of attention in the secondary literature. It is fair to say, however, that the treatment of Deleuzian agency has taken a variety of different and sometimes incompatible forms. A useful way of framing these differences in approach is to view them as turning on the question of the relation between human and nonhuman agencies, where ‘nonhuman agency’ sometimes means ‘the agency of that which subtends the human’, and sometimes ‘the agency of entities other than human beings’. I would suggest that we can distinguish the ways in which scholars have understood Deleuze’s conception of agency by dividing them into two broad camps. On the one hand, there are those who see Deleuze as denying agency to human beings because real agency is essentially nonhuman, in the first sense of this phrase. In other words, for a number of readers of Deleuze, agency must be ontologically identified with something like the ‘virtual’ ground of all actual things and the events attributable to them. On the other hand, there are those who understand Deleuze as granting agency to human beings. Within this second camp, however, we must further distinguish between those who take Deleuze to treat human and nonhuman agency in a symmetrical way (with ‘nonhuman’ in this case meaning animals, but also non-organic things); and those who see in Deleuze’s work a connection between human agency and some form of nonhuman agency (in the first and/or second sense of this phrase), but who nevertheless also affirm a distinct kind of human intentional agency.

AN ANTI-POSITIVIST CONCEPTION OF PROBLEMS: deleuze, bergson and the french epistemological tradition

Abstract This paper critically examines the relation between problems and the formation and development of concepts in Bergson’s work, as well as in Bachelard, Canguilhem and Deleuze. Building on work by Elie During, I argue that it is not only Bergson but also Deleuze who shares with the French epistemological tradition an “anti-positivist” conception of concept formation, founded upon the posing and solving of novel problems as opposed to the acquisition and verification of empirical facts. Contrary to During, however, I argue that it is not Bergson but Deleuze who furnishes us with an “anti-positivist” conception of problems that is adequate to this anti-positivist conception of concept formation. Deleuze’s anti-positivist view of problems holds, firstly, that genuine problems require the creation of novel terms in which to state and solve them. He shares this view with Bergson, Bachelard and Canguilhem. Secondly, however, Deleuze holds that a problem’s “truth” is not to be evaluated with reference to its eventual solutions (as is the case in Bachelard and Canguilhem), nor with reference to some privileged and contentful experience of reality (as with Bergson), but is rather a matter of its purely intrinsic productivity.