Epistemological Reflections on Minor Points in Deleuze

"In barren times philosophy retreats to reflecting 'on' things. If it's not itself creating anything, what can it do but reflect on something?"

(Gilles Deleuze, N 122).

1

Deleuze is a philosopher of lines, not points. This means, first of all, that Deleuze thinks along lines instead of reflecting on points, because he grants full ontological autonomy to the line. Lines, for Deleuze, are entities in their own right. Figures are lines, words are lines, and numbers are lines, too. Even points can be seen as (interacting or collapsed) lines. Deleuze owes this insight to Hume: "Hume's originality … comes from the force with which he asserts that relations are external to their terms" (PI 37). Relations are lines between terms, and they exist independently from the points or terms they happen to connect. These lines follow their own logic, which is the rhizomatic logic of the AND. "There are no points or positions in a rhizome … There are only lines" (ATP 8). The AND (the line, the relation) does not depend upon or originate in between points or terms, but exists outside of them, apart from them. The line is. Its being is becoming.

2

It means, second, that Deleuze values becoming over being, movement over stasis, verbs over nouns. Deleuze's cosmology is one of infinite expanse and limitless movement. Although this movement is constantly arrested, bound, and territorialized onto specific assemblages, no-thing ever comes to a complete and full standstill within them. This is Bergson's vitalism moving through Deleuze. It expresses a life that breaths up and down, in and out of the line. Even though lines get caught up in different strata, they always remain connected to the virtual out of which both lines and strata arise in the first place. "Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images" (D 148).¹ A multiplicity of pure becoming, the virtual is one of two (or three) ontological dimensions in Deleuze's cosmology besides the actual (and the intensive).² As lines of flight traverse these dimensions and cut across them, they always "endure," "insist," "subsist" as lines even if they appear to terminate at some point. Although all lines are more or less stratified, they still remain dynamical processes connected to the virtual. Unlike points, lines are not finite. Lines never end.

1, 2

As Deleuze' philosophy unfolds, the lines connecting Hume and Bergson create more and more points as they intersect with other lines (art, science, politics) and zigzag across the planes. Points, like all things, are derived from lines: "I tend to think of things as sets of lines to be unraveled but also to be made to intersect. Lines aren't things running between two points; points are where several lines intersect. Lines never run uniformly, and points are nothing but inflections of lines" (N 161). Lines precede points. They are ontologically primary.

The following essay centers on a single question, namely why points should be reduced to "inflections of lines"? Why does Deleuze not consider points (and terms) equal to lines (and relations)? And what are the epistemological consequences of this ontological reduction? Deleuze scholars have not addressed this question, but instead keep reasserting the primacy of lines over points in Deleuze's work.³ If this were correct, however, Deleuze would have achieved nothing more than a simple reversal of the traditional hierarchy between points and lines. Whereas before, lines emerged from (connecting) points, points now follow from (intersecting) lines. Such a reversal of power hardly constitutes an event, and it is most certainly not what Deleuze tried to accomplish in his philosophy. Rather than subordinating points of being to lines of becoming, his primary objective was to emancipate lines from points—and to render becoming ontologically independent from being. It was a project for the liberation of movement in the most democratic sense.

But in his effort to challenge the traditional habits of thinking that stand in the way of this liberation, Deleuze overemphasized the importance of lines versus points and movement versus standstill. Trying to banish the mere appearance...