Deleuze's Non-Ontology?

OK so here’s the case for a non-ontological Deleuze - a Deleuze against ontology and for: ethology.

The best book ever written on Deleuze? Yes.

The first point is simply textual: “establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology…” - these are the lines that close out the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, where a logic of the “AND” is elevated over and against any logic of the “IS”. This is the first sense in which Deleuze is not an ontological thinker: he not only makes no effort to think ‘what is’, but works to displace the question of ‘what is?’ entirely. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the profusion of Deleuzian concepts - event, becoming, multiplicity, rhizome, etc - are all so many ways to think otherwise than ‘what is’. Of the event, for example, Deleuze wrote: “I’ve tried to discover the nature of events; it’s a philosophical concept, the only one capable of ousting the verb ‘to be’ and attributes.” (If anyone's interested, I wrote more about the logic of the 'AND' and its relation to 'becoming' in a previous post).

Already in Difference and Repetition is this project announced: “'What is X?' gives way to other questions, otherwise powerful and efficacious, otherwise imperative: 'How much, how and in what cases?’”. (DR,188) And note how he opposes the kind of questions these are: “These questions are those of the accident, the event, the multiplicity - of difference - as opposed to that of the essence, or that of the One, or those of the contrary and the contradictory.” (DR,188) Granting all this, is Deleuze still just substituting one kind of ontology for another kind of ontology? An ‘ontology of Being’ for an ‘ontology of Becoming,’ say? Why is Deleuze not offering just another ontology in a line of ’new’ ontologies? What’s at stake in the claim - most forcefully made by the late, great François Zourabichvili, that, “if there is an orientation of the philosophy of Deleuze, this is it: the extinction of the term ‘being’ and therefore of ontology”? (what a phrase!).

In a word: the place of ethics. In his 1980/1 Spinoza lectures, Deleuze makes the curious claim that “there has never been but a single ontology. There is only Spinoza who has managed to pull off an ontology”(!). Why? Because only in Spinoza is Being not subordinated to something ‘above’ it by which Being can be judged. Spinoza’s “pure ontology… repudiates hierarchies” and thus lends itself to a way of engaging Being solely on its own terms: “immanent” terms. But a pure ontology does something very strange. It abolishes itself as ontology. Here is how Deleuze ends his lecture series: “At that point [with Spinoza], an ontology becomes possible; at that point, the ontology begins, and, at that point, the ontology ends. Yes, starts and ends, there we are, good, [Pause] it’s over”. In other words - an ontology unalloyed to hierarchy ceases be remain an ontology. It becomes something other. This is the basis of Zourabichvili’s claim that “the most glorious act of ontology [for Deleuze] … leads to its auto-abolition as a doctrine of being” (D:PE,38). 

In place of hierarchy - and in place of what Deleuze calls ‘judgement’ & morality - is instead ‘ethology’. Ethology is nothing other than an ethics (distinguished from “morality”), but one that proceeds not on the basis of what things are, but instead, what things can do. Without going into the details, the significance of this move for ontology is that what a thing is is never given. Instead it varies with its circumstances: “For they always are, but in different ways, depending on whether the present affects threaten the thing or strengthen, accelerate, and increase it: poison or food? - with all the complications, since a poison can be a food for part of the thing considered” (S:PP,126).

This, in turn is the basis for Deleuze’s celebrated empiricism: to know what a body is, is to have to test it, to bring it to its limits, compose it with other bodies, likewise defined. Philosophy itself becomes a matter of cartography, of mapping: “A body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude… its relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude)… Latitude and longitude are the two elements of a cartography” (ATP,262). Such a cartography is in the first instance ethical, insofar as it attempts to not "separate a body from what it can do" - such a separation being the mark of all ontology prior to Spinoza. In fact, if Deleuze is right, of all ontology that does not abolish itself.

Such then, are the stakes of a non-ontology! I'll offer just two other things that follow from this. First, Deleuze's increasing obsession with the concept of "Life", at the end of his career, can be traced to this non-ontological stance. Not ontology, but Life is the ground which Deleuze worked to tread upon in his late work, precisely because Life is just that which - as Nietzsche so insisted - cannot be judged. That Deleuze's last work was nothing other than "Immanence: a Life", attests to this. The definite article "a", is significant too, because it speaks to Deleuze's equally increased attention to Duns Scotus' concept of haecceity, which equally follows from the turning away from ontology. Anne Sauvagnargues has written more eloquently than I ever could on this issue, so I'll simply quote her on this (from her Deleuze and Art):

"As soon as this modal cartography of the haecceity is applied to individuation, everything changes. Art and philosophy become capable of treating individuality as an event, not as a thing. It is thus also possible to be interested in these perfect individualities that are well formed no matter the singularities, which the theory of substantial subjects could not accomplish. A season, a winter, “5 o’clock in the evening,” are such haecceities, or modal individualities that consist of relations of speeds and slownesses, capable of affecting or of being affected. A quality of whiteness, the vibration of an hour, the squatting of a stone, and an afternoon in the steppe form these modes of individuation that are more fragile, less anthropomorphic, and not necessarily more unstable or evanescent, but much more interesting than human individuals, or rather, the divisions we are used to, which borrow some aspect of substance (a thing, an animal, a man). Instead of holding itself to clichés of form, art captures and renders such imperceptible forces perceptible." (p.45)

This should be enough, but I’ll only add one kinda scholarly thing . The eagle-eyed might have noticed that in Difference and Repetition, it isn’t Spinoza, but Scotus who is given credit for having ‘pulled off’ an ontology. Here’s the line: “There has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal. There has only ever been one ontology, that of Duns Scotus, which gave being a single voice” (D&R,35). My mini-thesis is that as Deleuze got more and more sus about ontology, he realized that the best way out of it, was through it. And it was only Spinoza - the Christ of philosophers - as Deleuze and Guattari put it - who offered the resources to explode ontology from the inside.