Date: Thu, 21 Sep 1995 01:38:47 -0500
From: aden-AT-user1.channel1.com (Aden Evens)
Subject: Re: eliminating transgression


Chris sez:

>Being as that i have no _sense_ of transgression, and i owe this
>to Deleuze's rejection of the 'Other' as the place of the possible within
>the world of representation, i thought i would point out this absense
>of the Other and thus the possibility of 'transgression' in Deleuze's
>thought.
>

[...]

>
>As is well known by those who have really studied Deleuze, the category
>of the possible is eliminated in all of his work.
>
>chris

Deleuze does recuperate a notion of otherness, specifically as related to
possibility, in Chapter V of D&R:

"Consider a terrified face (under conditions such that I do not see and do
not experience the causes of this terror). This face expresses a possible
world: the terrifying world. [...] By 'possible', therefore, we do not mean
any resemblance but that state of the implicated or enveloped in its very
heterogeneity with what envelops it: the terrified face does not resemble
what terrifies it, it envelops a state of the terrifying world. In every
psychic system there is a swarm of possibilities around reality, but our
possibles are always Others. The Other cannot be separated from the
expressivity which constitutes it." [p.260]

While I don't think this is tantamount to eliminating possibility, it does
alter the modal value of possibility. That is, Deleuze's possible is no
longer just like the actual, except, in fact, not actual. (Explanations of
modality which refer to the theory of possible worlds, very popular in
analytic philosophy [see Lewis, for example], make out possibility just to
be the actuality of some other universe.) Rather, the possible is
implicated in an expression; the possible is actual as expression, but
virtual as implicated or enveloped. Moreover, although otherness is also
given a positive place in these pages of D&R, it is still not an otherness
which makes possible transgression, for "it is not the other which is
another I, but the I which is an other, a fractured I" [p.261]. To reach or
to realize the other is no transgression, for the I has already reached the
other, which is already fully real. Only when the implicated possibility is
explicated can it be measured against some state of things, and then deemed
actual, impossible, 'merely possible', etc. One means of this explication
is language, so "the lie inscribed within language" is to explicate the
possible, and bury its implicated reality behind a reality explicated,
measured, and judged as to mode.



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