Date:     Tue, 12 Mar 1996 20:59 EST
From: 044724240-AT-ucis.vill.edu
Subject:  RE: Re[2]: Stardust & spiders & sub-jects &



One other thing you'll notice reading matter and memory that is apropos
of the present discussion--and kind of expresses my limits regarding
contributing to it--is that Deleuze's reading of Hume is Bergsonian.  Not
in the sense that D repeats B's criticisms of empiricism--which, after all,
are not entirely directed at Hume, but rather that the elaboration of
a genesis of subjectivity along these lines is a project that becomes
much clearer if we take B into account.  And it is thus no surprise that
we find Deleuze writing a book on Hume followed immediately by a book
on Bergson.

Also, to Howie, I think.  You mention that the problem with passing from
possible to actual is that there is a real/non-real divide that must
be crossed.  Now, the whole point of D's OPPOSITION to that entire structure
and the representative image of thought in which it is embedded is that
the possible does not adequately charecterize the problematic, which IS
REAL, and thus (drum roll please) Deleuze invents/borrows (from Bergson,
no less) the virtual-actual structure precisely as opposed to the entire
discourse of possibility.  Both V & A are real.  THERE IS NO "POSSIBILITY"
IN DELEUZE.  

Dog, I seem to be nit-pick boy this past week or so.  c'est la vie.

Ed Kazarian,
Villanova University.

P.s., Karen, wait till you get to the end, where Bergson begins talking
about the whole virtual-actual thing, it will ring lots of bells, but
it will also make really apparent why the only people--besides Deleuzians--
who have been interested in B for the past thirty years or so in America
have been, yuk, Christian Existentialists...apparently, it was reading
B that allowed Jean-Luc Marion to find God, oh my...Which is also why it
is crucial, immediately upon finishing the book, to read D's postcript
to the english language edition of Bergsonism:  it works kind of like 
mouthwash.  More seriously, the operation that it seems to me D is 
performing on B is to eliminate all the elements from the text that
get "Elan Vital" translated as "Spirit":  with the approval of Bergson
himself, I might add...apparently his mother was English and he spoke
the language since childhood, and the Zone edition, which I assume is the
one you have, is the authorized translation.  So the work that D does to
B is to transform the project from a disentangling of idealism and materialism
so that we can say we're dualists to a disentangling of these two elements
so that we can say we're monists:  qua spinoza, which is precisely what the
virtual-problematic equation provides.  This is also the way in which
reading Hume was the condition for reading Bergson, as far as D was concerned.
One of these days I'm going to work all of that out more fully, and lo
and behold, I have to write a paper for this class I took on the cinema
books, which are animated by Matter and Memory, humm...


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