From: "keyman_in_brighton" <keyman_in_brighton-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: some sub-representative notes
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 14:05:52 +0100


Unlike, it seems to me, many others on this list, I really know nothing
about Deleuze and have no right to say anything about him nor do I want such
a right.  I like philosophy though.  It suites my tastes.

But "Sub-representative" is not MY language.  See D&R pages
56,69,178,264,267,286.....to mention just a few of the many passages where
this term is used.  How have you missed it?!?

why not look these up i thought - all references to english translation by
paul patton, athlone press.

Page 56 - used within scare quotes.  it's meaning, within the context, seems
to be 'the immediate' ("The immediate, defined as 'sub-representative'...").
Is this the first reference to sub-representative in DR?  Is this anything
other than a positing of a definition? ('defined as')  Nominal usage.  Also
Deleuze indicates some desire or possibly necessity to 'attain' such an
immediacy (the paragraphs in which the term is used and preceeding it are
littered with lots of 'musts' - always seems a very 'ethical' or pleading
sort of must.  Plainly not a logical must of material implication.

Page 69 - no scare quotes, now used in an adjactival sense to describe a
particular sort of domain, which presumably is the domain of the immediate,
going by P.56 - which also allows us to say that the 'sub-representative
domain' cannot be attained by representations - which is a little like
saying we can't think immediacy, perhaps.  Why is anyone interested in this
immediacy _within philosophy_?  Within art, yes, politics and activism even,
sex, love and death etc - these all seem to have an immediate
(sub-representative domain), but philosophy?  And surely if all we are
speaking of is the immediate thought (and in philosophy, the immediacy of
thought) then it seems to me that the cogito would constitute a
sub-representative thought (the indubitability, not the i am).

Page 178 - no scare quotes but no domain either, this time we have a
sub-representative element.  Presumably, following on the thread of
immediacy, we can suggest that this is the element of the immediate,
perhaps, speculating slightly now given the evidence here, I could even
suggest that this element of the immediate is the non-mediated.  Does that
get us anywhere?  It still seems that sub-representative means 'outside
representation' and little else.  Why sub?  Can anyone with french suggest a
background for this prefix-is it used?

Page 264 - part of the conclusion.  Here sub-representational is equated or
aligned with the extra-propositional and also with the 'source' of the
problem (which in this instance is that of the calculus and the antinomy
between infinite and finite representation...)  Again, it is a term that
seems to me to be simply marking the excess, what is (almost in principle by
definition) beyond representation.  At its most simplistic this simply seems
to be an argument that says
1) the immediate given is the source of all representations or
representational strategies
2) the immediate is incapable of representation

presumably 2) because of some reason...and some reason that allows us to
represent it enough to show that it is unrepresentable.  I must admit that
if this emphasis on the sub-representational domain is pursued, it looks to
me a lot like the unsayable which, as has been said, should be passed over.

Page 267 - the four 'transcendental illusions' of representation are
outlined in the conclusion to DR and here, whilst oultining the third
illusion of the Idea or Problem-Idea Deleuze is going on about the way in
which the negative is but the shadow of the affirmative.  The affirmative
Problem-Idea is the ground or 'universe' perhaps, from which the negative
arises but these Problem-Ideas are 'extra-propositional and
sub-representative'.  Again, the sub-representational domain is negatively
determined as that excess of beyond or bit outside the representational
'image of thought'.

Page 286 - here the subject of discussion is repetition, the context being
the strategies of representing repetition.  "That is why, in order to
represent repetition, contemplative souls must be installed here and there;
passive selves, sub-representative sytheses and habituses capable of
contracting the cases or the elements into one another...."

In all these cases where 'sub-representative' is used as a descriptive term
for a particular domain, sythesis or element, we have what in effect appears
to be a negative function, that is, sub-representative means 'that which is
beyond, before or outside representation'  - that which representation
cannot represent or account for.  Instead of it being a particularly
positive term within DR it seems instead to be a functional placeholder for
'that which is outside representation' and as such a bare begining for any
understanding of the afirmative nature of the Problem-Idea of difference in
itself.

keyman


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