How Could Nihilism Gain a Transcendental Status?
Evrim Bayındır2024, Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference, TU Delft
This presentation argues that Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition can be read as attempts to explain how nihilism gained a transcendental status. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze writes that nihilism "is the transcendental principle of our way of thinking". This brings a paradox: How could an a posteriori or historical emergence such as nihilism impose itself as an a priori condition? If this is true, nihilism should have-in a rather miraculous way-retrojected itself in the origin. This illusory retrojection occurs when reactive forces create an inverted image of the origin. This wouldn't be allowed, however, if active forces weren't marked by an unfortunate weakness. If a resentful memory can invade consciousness to the extent that the entirety of experience is confused with traces, this is only because the active force of forgetting was previously exhausted. Difference and Repetition offers a different conception of exhaustion or fatigue, which can be seen as an alternative response to the same problem. Here fatigue becomes a feature of the passive syntheses of the "contemplative souls" which are the first witnesses in the encounter with groundlessness. While the initial function of fatigue is to draw a difference, it can well be misunderstood as "lack" from the perspective of the active synthesis of memory. Memory thus exploits the fatigue of contemplative souls by triggering "the history of the long error" which culminates with the "retroject[ion]" of "identity onto the originary difference". In both books, Deleuze attributes an essential fatigue to the affirmative forces in order to explain the subsequent retrojections which endow nihilism with a transcendental sense. However, he doesn't provide an answer to why active forces are prone to failures and reactive forces are all the more skillful in exploiting these failures.