Never has a book had such staying power in my life, for its sense and nonsense, than Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. I return to two of its short chapters again and again, more so than any other part of any other book I own.
‘The Twenty-First Series on the Event’ has been inscribed indelibly upon my heart. Friends will recognise how often I quote Deleuze whenever talk turns to militancy, responsibility, commitment, resilience, and facing crises with grace. Quoting Joë Bousquet, he writes:
“My wound exist before me, I was born to embody it.” It is a question of attaining this will that the event creates within us; of becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us […] It is a question of becoming a citizen of the world. […] Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.
For ten years, I have been channelling this sentiment whenever life drops its latest crop of lemons. (Sometimes far from successfully, of course, but the intention is always there, as a guiding principle or something to aim for, if nothing else.)
That being said, Deleuze’s phrasing is not ideal. His talk of “worthiness” is certainly not a moral judgement, but it is a value judgement. These values are not received but our own; they are the ‘surplus value’, if you will, of our hardest labours. In this brief nod to the economic, Deleuze alludes to weights, costs, sacrifices, and insists that we place more ‘value’ on ourselves when we might be more inclined to see ourselves as lesser, flawed, or somehow broken by the world.
This was Bousquet’s lesson too; a lesson to be radically affirmed. Bousquet, who embodied his paraplegic fate as a soldier wounded in war to later lift his thought to a higher level. His body may have ‘failed’ him, but his life was certainly not ruined. His wound afforded him new capacities and opportunities, and he seized upon them from his bed. Deleuze’s borrowed mantra, then, is the expression of a sentiment of personal accountability and responsibility, and it is notably one with a Stoic bent. (“Bousquet must be called Stoic”, he says.)
This Stoicism is best summarised elsewhere, through the sagely wisdom of Epictetus:
Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.
I think I treasure this sentiment so much because it is one of the hardest things in the world to accept and actualize. If I repeat it to myself so often, it is for the sake of my own ‘sense’ of orientation when things make little sense at all. I affirm it consciously because I really struggle to believe it. I struggle with acceptance. Don’t we all? Less common, perhaps, is a penchant for philosophy in response. Truly, this response is misguided, and anyway, I’m less a philosopher than a neurotic who can’t shake the belief that understanding alleviates pain. It never does, but this is how I have learned to cope all the same: anxiously.
Deleuze’s Stoicism attracts, then, because it runs contrary to almost every emotion I am likely to feel in a crisis. The Stoics do not teach apathy or indifference; they teach a radical acceptance of the event, even (or especially) when it hurts us. Their credo is best encapsulated, perhaps, in more modern times, by the ‘serenity prayer’:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
If the winds are not blowing in the direction I want, I will resist the temptation to set sail regardless, but I will remain attuned to a change in their direction, which announces that time when we must leap into action. A truism remains, however: you can’t always get what you want. Accepting this may well be the last place we arrive at. Serenity is hard won.
There is also something further to be taken from Deleuze and Bousquet, however, which extends beyond Epictetus’ aphorism. It is a choice.
I also choose to accept the person that I am and have become, shaped by external forces and pockmarked by catastrophes. Alongside this choice, I forcibly reject, against all unfortunate inclinations to the contrary, a tendency that can just as well lead to (self-)destruction. The problem is that the wound, when it arrives, can cut so deep that it is hard not to register the possible emergence of a new self as the violent death of the old one. Is there nothing that can be salvaged? Must all good things go to waste? Why must these apocalypses happen so frequently? We are really expected to will these misfortunes so easily?
We salvage plenty, of course. We must. But for all the fortitude of Deleuze’s ethics of contingency, there is certainly no suggestion that we chant these mantras and be done with it, as if anything were ever so easy. The difficulty is the point, and necessitates that we bear in mind the potential to slump into Stoicism’s opposite (whatever that might be) at all times. Indeed, the dissonance felt in trying to accept what first appears as unacceptable can just as well drive you mad.
Yesterday, as I took the train across London to join friends on trial for direct action at Woolwich Crown Court, I brought Logic of Sense along for the ride. This time, however, I skipped over the twenty-first series, and instead found myself in the twenty-second: ‘Porcelain and Volcano’.
Deleuze begins with what might be one of my favourite passages in any work of philosophy, perhaps because it reapplies parts of his conceptual armature to something more closely resembling art. I will resist the temptation to explicate it and let it unfurl with its own meter:
“Of course all life is a process of breaking down…” Few phrases resonate in our heads with such a hammer blow, few texts possess this final character of a masterpiece, or are able to impose silence or force such terrified acquiescence as Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up. The entire work of Fitzgerald is the unique development of this proposition – in particular, of the “of course”. Here is a man and a woman, there is a couple (and why couples, if not because it is already a question of movement, and of a process defined on the basis of the dyad?) who have, as we say, everything it takes to be happy: looks, charm, riches, superficiality, and lots of talent. And then something terrible happens that shatters them like an old plate or glass. There is a terrible tête-à-tête of the schizophrenic and the alcoholic, unless death takes them both. Is this the notorious self-destruction? What has happened exactly? They have not tried anything special beyond their power, and yet they wake up as if from a battle which has been too much for them, their bodies broken, their muscles strained, their souls dead: “a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. No problem set – simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing … My self-immolation was something sodden-dark.” In fact, a lot has happened, outside as well as inside: the war, the financial crash, a certain growing older, the depression, illness, the flight of talent. But all these noisy accidents already have their outright effects; and they would not be sufficient in themselves had they not dug their way down to something of a wholly different nature which, on the contrary, they reveal only at a distance and when it is too late – the silent crack. “Why have we lost peace, love, and health one after the other?” There was a silent, imperceptible crack, at the surface, a unique surface Event.
It is hard not to read these words and think immediately of all that the last year (or even just the last month) of my life has contained. Yes, why must everything be lost all at once? Perhaps not peace – when was the last time this world felt peaceful? – but love and health and money and home. I can accept that it has happened, but I resist just how ridiculous and unnecessary this constellation of blows has been. Still, there remains much to gain in accepting them – if acceptance can ever be wrangled from the shock of grief, disbelief, and disappointment – but how radically different and even impoverished all gains appear when placed next to everything that I previously hoped for.
Because of course there is always much to gain after loss. It is a poor consolation. And how utterly unwanted these losses are anyway. Speculative gains serve no purpose in my desire to make the world I wanted whole. I still long for it, although not without difference of course. Indeed,it is impossible to imagine a world-to-come where the crack is no longer felt. But must it be that there is “no way, before total disintegration sets in, of at least saving the severed parts?” It is all so undeniably maddening, to the extent that even acceptance of so much ridiculousness feels mad.
Here, the twenty-second series pushes back against the twenty-first: yes, affirm your wounds, be reborn in them, but how is the crack to be affirmed when the new world created has lost its sense? Deleuze follows up with a question that feels hyperbolic: how to avoid, in the immediate aftermath of a wounding, suicide or alcoholism (as if these are the only two options)? But we know these outcomes are all too common for the many who are cracked by the event that squanders all sense. A world already destroyed, we partake in our own processes of demolition. But must we?
For me personally, life is very different to what it once was, when this question of “to be or not to be” carried a real and unwell grandeur. Old thought patterns return with most extreme overwhelms, whenever they do occur, but they are also resisted with far more strength than a few years ago – even if this resistance is itself conscious and exhausting. There are always strategies, always ways to rebuild. Certainly, nothing has happened recently that can’t be remedied. That is partly why the blows feels so nonsensical, just as the intrusive thoughts of cracking up lack sense as well.
Ultimately, there is no quibbling with the truth: death or self-injury achieve nothing and certainly make everything worse. Death especially may bring an absolute relief to the individual who ceases to exist, but the knowledge of its impact on others is harder to bear. Alcohol and drugs similarly have no benefits outside of a brief reprieve from cracked time, as tempting as these reprieves may be. If not a permanent ending, then they at least provide a temporary evacuation of an inner world where hurt has lodged itself, before everything comes crashing back down again. More than anything, these destructions hurt those who love us, which is always to be avoided if we can help it. So, with both options fully removed from the table, what is left over? Must it be the infernal interrogation of life as it now appears to be, unmedicated and raw? Must we replace oblivion with interrogation always?
The philosopher’s questions that Deleuze drags out of the resulting turmoil are humbling, because he knows that they are as essential as they are useless:
If there is a crack at the surface, how can we prevent deep life from becoming a demolition job and prevent it from becoming it as a matter “of course”? Is it possible to maintain the inherence of the incorporeal crack while taking care not to bring it into existence, and not to incarnate it in the depth of the body? More precisely, it is possible to limit ourselves to the counter-actualization of the event – while taking care to prevent the full actualisation which characterizes the victim or the true patient?
To raise these questions suggests some attempt at reconciliation through the intellect, whether for oneself or for the cleft world we are struggling to understand. But they remain forms of bargaining and denial regarding what afflicts us, and may just as well be tossed aside. What good comes from studying the crack, after all? What use is there in solving its questions with academic proofs and logical formulas? These are so many attempts to reinstitute sense whenever nonsense floods the crack. Hubris abounds, and it depresses me, not least because I have so often been guilty of incurring an academic nonsense when things get hard.
For Deleuze, the most pathetic set of options can be framed as follows:
Are we to become professionals who give talks on these topics? Are we to wish only that those who have been struck down do not abuse themselves too much? Are we to take up collections and special journal issues? Or should we go a short way further to see for ourselves, be a little alcoholic, a little crazy, a little suicidal, a little of a guerrilla – just enough to extend the crack, but not enough to deepen it irremedially? Wherever we turn, everything seems dismal.
It is hard to escape the spiral. That is why the ways in which we respond are all the more important. If we remember that reason is a feeling, then art and philosophy soon joust for position here, as in Deleuze’s prose, curdling and curtailing each other. Both art and philosophy can be pursued irresponsibly. How, then, do we respond responsibly?
I talk to friends about issues with pain management. For me, once pain is felt and noticed, whether mental or physical, it can quickly take over. It is analysed obsessively, as if a full understanding of the cause will neutralise the effect, and so the pain only gets worse. To intellectualise mental anguish creates safety through a false distance, but also feels like a betrayal of those feelings that must be felt. Reason and feeling are split irresponsibly. There is also a fear that the act of interrogation or analysis might be a betrayal of another who is afflicted by this pain in their own way – because no pain is ever as solitary as it seems. For this reason, to affirm and make oneself worthy are different from any claim of ownership, but a pain shared needn’t go unexpressed just because it is not mine alone. This is why we are often better deferring to the mythological to explain our traumas; sometimes what is most useful to counter our self-victimisation is to tell a tale without origin or author – a folk tale, held and disseminated collectively.
Friends recognise this in their own ways and announce that distraction is the best way for them to help and offer comfort as I struggle with my litany of recent losses. It doesn’t last for long, of course. Returning home from my first night out in well over a year, I find that I remain utterly alienated. After everything, I wallow in a sense of injustice, more personal than before but no less familiar. Circumstances have changed, but the oblivion of others to suffering, even when it is most personal and hidden, can be hard to overcome. I try to make the best of things regardless and let myself be guided by the hospitality of others, making myself worthy of their company if I am able. As evening turns to night, I slip back into circular conversations, grasping desperately for some sort of sense that might mend the crack I feel in my chest. Despite my fears, I am assured this does not make me bad company. Often, these conversation meander wildly and we all feel better for what we have learned about each other. New friendships have been solidified quickly as a result.
These conversations are essential for me. I need to know what others think, if only so I can feel assured that my many racing thoughts are not wholly cleft from reality. I am assured that they are not, but that doesn’t mean I understand them any better. And if I cannot understand my own feelings, maybe I can better understand someone else’s. “Stop making excuses for others,” they say, as I defer constantly to a compassion I am reluctant to extend to myself. “Stop trying to understand and hold together all sides. What do you feel?” I don’t feel great. I mostly feel hurt. But forgiveness is my first instinct, for better or worse. Still, this does not change the fact that you cannot reason with the crack.
Deleuze quotes a passage about a rock split in two from Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano:
she moved herself nearer it, poured out her pleas, her passionate tears, told all her forgiveness: the rock stood unmoved. “That’s all very well,” it said, “but it happens to be your fault, and as for myself, I propose to disintegrate as I please!”
I imagine myself picking up two halves of split rock, trying to find whatever angle is needed to put the pieces back together seamlessly, so that the crack disappears. At the same time, I am aware that the resulting friction grinds and gnaws further at the edges of two surfaces, so that the crack is only more assured. I find the process of watching this disintegration take its course to be unbearable (“of course”). Must the event unfold like this? Can it not unfold another way? Please? Accepting the crack is painful because it starts to make it true. I do not want it to be true, but resisting that truth makes the crack just as final. You cannot argue with rocks.
There are still ways to accept cracks that also help us mend them. I imagine a kintsugi bowl: broken pottery repaired with golden lacquer, all the more beautiful for its scars. Repair is always possible. It is a case of waiting for the right moment and the right materials. This delicate work can never be rushed. Porcelain is formed in heat but not repair by it.
This is the only way I can imagine the crack to be affirmed. Other analogies come to mind. The crack cannot be affirmed by thrusting one’s fingers into it with a repugnant curiosity, for example, although I know I have a tendency to do this as well. Doubting Thomas might be a parabolic figure of wonder, but I’m sure he was still left with blood on his hands. As my friend reminds me constantly, an awareness of these flaws might have some value, “but it doesn’t mean you deserve to be taken out back and shot.”
Ten years ago, when Mark Fisher died, I first came across Deleuze’s series on sense and nonsense and was led, via his footnotes, to the work of Maurice Blanchot. I had already been reading Georges Bataille, and found their proximity to one another enthralling – friendly opposites, you might say.
Bataille was attractive to me then for his transgressions. (Youthful ‘edgelord’ eras are an embarrassment, but an unfortunate rite of passage for many students of philosophy.) The ways in which Bataille thrust himself deeply into wounds was a tactic for immersing oneself in truth that I admired and did not yet find messy and naive. That is because I was also wounded then, and picking at my wounds as well. Like Bataille (I would tell myself), I sought to “go a short way further … just enough to extend the crack” – as if there is any virtue in extending the crack all the way through yourself, splitting yourself in two to mimic the broken world; as if there is ever any truth in mere mimicry.
Deleuze acknowledges this attraction to masochistic self-destruction himself when he writes:
If one asks why health does not suffice, why the crack is desirable, it is perhaps because only by means of the crack and at its edges that thought occurs, that anything that is good and great in humanity enters and exits through it, in people ready to destroy themselves – better death than the health which we are given.
This idea has a disastrously undeniable sense when you are going through a reckoning – most often, a reckoning with another’s choice to end a world, whatever form that end takes. To affirm it is to find a way to end a world for oneself; to reclaim autonomy and purpose in the widening of the rupture; to identify with one’s symptom and wilfully go mad. But this is not the Stoic’s choice; better something else, a Joycean sort of symptomaticity perhaps. Deleuze attests to this alternative as well, when he suggests that the real test of strength is:
to give to the crack the chance of flying over its own incorporeal surface area, without stopping at the bursting within each body; it is, finally, to give us the chance to go farther than we would have believed possible.
It is always possible to reform, go further, keep moving. It may well require a change in direction, but which path do we choose? Kintsugi. For myself, I am less interested in the going-farther of my individual shard these days. I have done the work of striding out jagged on my own without any notion of rootedness; friends aplenty, but no ‘family’ to speak of. I found a new version of myself by travelling inwards, that much is true, but this self was too lonely. I had to kill it. I have had to kill it again and again. I killed it recently in moving to London. I found myself cleft again in other ways regardless.
I will continue to reaffirm just how integral other people are to the self that I am. I want to go farther than I would have believed possible with them, but also, more specifically, with another. I love the movement of the dyad. That was the path I was on, before the event, the crack, disrupted the journey. Embattled and exhausted, the movement came to an abrupt and disorienting end.
The quest(ion) is unchanged: how to restart the line of flight that tacks alongside the cracks at the surface? Can the same line be restarted? Is it necessary to start another? A lover-girl at heart, these questions are more profound to me than mere romanticism. As it was for Deleuze in his reading of Proust, there is a growing inclination to leave philosophy and its analyses behind, or at least deepen them so that they might be transformed into something else:
Proust sets in opposition to the traditional pairing of friendship and philosophy a more obscure pairing formed by love and art. A mediocre love is worth more than a great friendship because love is rich in signs and is fed by silent interpretation. A work of art is worth more than a philosophical work; for what is enveloped in the sign is more profound than all the explicit significations. What does violence to us is richer than all the fruits of our goodwill or of our conscious work, and more important than thought is ‘what is food for thought’.
Reason flees from all attempts at reasoning. Thought differs from what is food for thought. Agony differs from discomfort. It is strange that we prefer the former in each coupling, but so we do. Deleuze knows this because he knows Hume well, who famously wrote that: “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” In heartbreak, perhaps this is felt all the more profoundly because what is being mourned is a world that was once at one’s fingertips. Only art allows us to process that most harrowing feeling in the world, which comes after the crack, when what I once touched and what once touched me is now no longer there. It is thoughts of another person’s skin no longer at my fingertips that hurts most deeply. Take away my fingers, then, because it is already after the end of the world.
The cracking of the dyad is nonetheless resisted in two directions. Let it be felt, but not embodied. Save yourself from going too far in either direction. False ascetism or melodrama are all that await us there. Still, there is no right or wrong way to respond when the crack is felt. “Feel your feelings!” I try, but too often messiness follows, and if I am to weather this mess and tidy it, I still have to write my feelings down to make them legible – to myself, if no one else. There is no glee or glamour taken from this task. I hate everything about it and give myself the ick constantly. Indeed, it feels like a sickness to enter so wilfully into one’s vulnerabilities and twist them up in language. Then why bother at all? It is one way of not going so far in either direction, I suppose.
This is not an attempt to philosophize, nor an attempt at art; the difference between lover and friend is what remains so potently obscured here. It exists. It is vital. It is also paradoxical in its entanglements. The responsible lover is a responsible friend, and vice versa; the irresponsible lover is an irresponsible friend, and vice versa. One is not so easily replaced by the other when feelings are trampled. There must be the right amount of continuity and difference between them. Identifying these continuities and differences is, quite literally, not for the faint of heart, because who is to say which is which anyway, or what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. There can be no moral judgements in love; only values shared and built upon. Sadly, the work of construction is never assured, but I do not expect to stop trying any time soon.
It is all to be played for. The game is fraught. But no one knows the score. It seldom even matters.
Over a late cup of tea, brewed for me as I felt all my feelings, one of my new flatmates recalled a parable about an old man and his horse. It went something like this:
The old man’s horse runs away. The villagers say, “I’m so sorry! That was your livelihood! Everything must be terrible right now!”
“Maybe,” he says.
A few days later, the horse returns with three others in tow. The man now has four horses. “Amazing!” the villagers say. “Your luck has turned!”
“Maybe,” he says.
Wrangling his four horses, the man struggles to look after them. He is knocked over and breaks his leg. “How terrible!” the villagers say.
“Maybe.”
The army comes through town to conscript new soldiers. They pass over the man with his broken leg. “What a relief!” the villagers say.
“Maybe.”
They take his son instead…
We never know how life will turn out. What feels like the best thing in the world might eventually ruin us. What ruins us for a moment might lead to a change in fortune. Maybe.
I am reminded, in hearing this story, of Deleuze’s opening interest in Alice in Wonderland. After drinking the potion, she is bigger than she was before, when she was smaller. There is no clarity regarding what size Alice actually “is”. The paradox of a pure becoming, a pure difference, eludes the present. Deleuze’s series, which follow this opening gambit, are neither wholly sensical nor nonsensical. They are not commensurate. They contradict each other. They hang together, but they do not cohere. This is where their movement comes from: the paradoxes.
My world suddenly feels a lot bigger than it did a few weeks ago. It also feels painfully smaller and shallower and emptier. The paradox is nauseating. It cracks me. There is no denying either the nausea or the crack. The comfort once taken from Deleuze’s twenty-first series vanishes when placed next to the twenty-second. Sense chips off as each section rubs together. That’s life, I suppose. My heart gets simultaneously bigger and smaller all the time. I resent it, but nonetheless try to keep my heart open to whatever comes next, when the dust settles and the clay resets.
I look to mending and remaining worthy.