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Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life

by Gilles Deleuze.
With an introduction by John Rajchman; translated by Anne Boyman
Zone Books, New York, 2001
102 pp. Trade, $ 24.00. ISBN 1-890951-24-2
Reviewed by Patricia Pisters
University of Amsterdam / Media Studies
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16 1012 CP
Amsterdam
The Netherlands
patricia.pisters@hum.uva.nl

Experimenting with the Sensible

Trying to review the three short essays by Deleuze that are collected and newly translated in Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life is almost impossible. All essays are very rich and each sentence contains another step in Deleuze's argumentation of his ideas on immanence. Therefore I can only try to give an impression of his thoughts. In the first essay, 'Immanence: A Life', which Deleuze wrote just before his death and can be considered as his philosophical testament, he discusses his philosophical method which he calls 'transcendental empiricism'.According to Deleuze pure immanence is A LIFE, and nothing else. When a life is actualised in the particular life of somebody it is transcended, but always as a product of immanence. Deleuze recalls Charles Dickens description of a disreputable man, a rogue, who is abandoned by everyone and who is found the moment he is dying. Those who take care of him treat him with respect, trying to fight for his life. And 'between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death.' (p. 28) With this artistic example Deleuze explains what he means by the indefiniteness of immanent life (the plane of immanence) that is at the heart of his philosophy.

According to Deleuze, immanence can only be thought through radical empiricism and in the second essay of the book, he looks deeper into the nature of empiricism through the work of Hume. According to Hume human nature (subjectivity) is constituted by two principles: principles of association from which relations derive, and principles of passion from which 'inclinations' follow. Fiction and imagination (and thus art, the sensible) play a big role in both principles. Deleuze explains how according to Hume, the constitution of an identity of the self requires the intervention of all sorts of fictive uses of associations and relations. The self is not given, but constituted in fiction and experience. In respect to the principle of passion the imagination is necessary to make passion go beyond its natural partiality and presentness. Aesthetic and moral sentiments are formed in this way and are at the same time very important constitutive principles.

The third essay in Pure Immanence is about Nietzsche. Also for Nietzsche the aesthetic is important to the point that the philosopher becomes a creator. Deleuze explains that Nietzsche's will to power consists not in taking but in creating and giving. In discussing the stages of Nietzsche's nihilism Deleuze explains how at the moment of the completion of nihilism everything is ready for a creative transmutation that consists of an active becoming of forces, a triumph of affirmation (instead of negation) in the will to power. And what is affirmed is the earth, life in its multiplicity and becomings.

Although the three essays in this book discuss very different aspects of the affirmative and immanent implications of Deleuze's philosophy, the aesthetic dimension seems very important. As John Rajchman explains in the introduction: 'through affect and percept, artworks hit upon something singular yet impersonal in our bodies and brains, irreducible to any pre-existent "we". (p. 10) Deleuze's transcendental empiricism implies a Kunstwollen or a 'becoming-art' that, for instance, cinema can give. In his cinema books Deleuze argues that cinema can contribute to giving us back reasons to believe in the world and the body. Cinema 'affects the visible with a fundamental disturbance, and the world with a suspension, which contradicts all natural perception. What it produces in this way is the genesis of an 'unknown body' which we have in the back of our heads, like the unthought in thought, the birth of the visible which is still hidden from view.' (The Time-Image, p. 201). Experimenting with the sensible is in this way essential to the plane of immanence of 'a life'. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari assign a similar task of restoring our believe in the world to philosophy: 'It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task or a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today.' (p. 75). This restoration of a belief in the world that is the most important task of both art and philosophy can only be understood in the definition of immanence as the virtualities that are contained (and not yet actualised or realised) in 'a life'. The essays in Pure Immanence emphasise once more the affirmative power of Deleuze's philosophy and deserve to be reread in relation to his work on aesthetic practices such as literature, painting and cinema.

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