עברית
To honour the greatest thinker of the 20th century, I post here some words from his last essay. Let it remind us, repeatedly, the difference between living, creative, and habitual, dead thinking.
“We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.”
“What is immanence? A life…No one has described what a life is better than Charles Dickens, if we take the indefinite article as an index of the transcendental. A disreputable man, a rouge, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degrees that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of alife playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens…”
“The indefinite article is the indetermination of the person only because it is the determination of the singular…”
“It even seems that a singular life might do without any individuality, without any other concomitant that individualizes it. For example, very small children all resemble one another and have hardly any individuality, but they have singularities: a smile, a gesture, a funny face--not subjective qualities…individual life, on the other hand, remains inseparable from empirical determinations…”.
Indeed, however, all the more so, we may add, what beauty and glory we experience, when this singular universal life is embodied and individualised, and speak to us through a creative person, revealing the universe in a single human personality- like Deleuze himself!
Read more about Delueze in my book, The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art