jonathanatographer

What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

With this quote the plane of immanence could be thought into an identity with the God of Spinoza as Deleuze uses it from Expressionism in Philosophy on. And there could be found good reasons for doing such. Deleuze often writes about Spinoza’s God as a plane of immanence, Spinoza had to create a plane of immanence, had to show it, had to think it, etc. (The history of Deleuze’s use of the equation plane of immanence = God in Spinoza may need to be traced. By MP there is Spinoza’s plane of immanence but the equation is missing. And after, there remains only the plane of immanence of Spinoza, no need to talk of Spinoza’s God.) The second chapter of WisP?, ‘The Plane of Immanence’, ends with a discussion of whether there is a best plane of immanence. THE plane of immanence is that which Spinoza created, on which all other planes of immanence are based. It is immanent to all other planes which do not succeed in thinking it because it is the unthought in thought, but also that which must be thought (59-60). The unthought in thought does not show up in D’s books until the Cinema books (?), and maybe even not until the Time-Image. The definition of the plane of immanence (D&G insist it is NOT a concept: “The plane of immanence is neither a concept nor the concept of all concepts” (35)) is modified by a new aspect – the unthought in thought. This modification should not allow commentators on Deleuze, those academics who we shall call Deleuzers, to insist on a constant Spinozist plane of immanence in Deleuze.
The Deleuzean plane of immanence has changed.
The plane of immanence is fractal, the individual is fractured by time. Spinoza’s conception of the individual’s relation to time could at best be described as chronological – the individual becomes aware of a single truth and follows that which it knows on to discover what are its good and bad encounters, what forces affect it, what forces it affects, etc. Philosophy had to wait for Kant to create the concept of the pure form of time before it was able to show that an individual is divided from itself in time – Rimbaud’s formula “I is an other” – and that its experiences receive a greater power when thought in temporal series which make an identity of chronological truth impossible. Deleuze himself, and in WisP? with Guattari, creates differences in the plane of immanence.
Two things are insufficient: the first is commentary from Deleuzers which, even if they are clever enough to not use the word identity, allow THE plane of immanence to congeal across all of Deleuze’s writings. The second would be commentary from either Deleuzers or, more likely, Deleuzean thinkers, which would painstakingly show the differences (we all know identity must be attacked and that differences must be drawn) between Deleuze’s planes of immanence, Deleuze & Guattari’s planes of immanence. Both commentaries will be insufficient.
Perhaps the problem is this: Can Deleuze be Deleuzed on Deleuzean territory? For example, D.N. Rodowick’s Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine fails, Deleuzes its project, Deleuzes its power by reterritorializing Deleuzean thought onto Deluzean territory. One option, perhaps, is to create properly Deleuzean concepts (as Deleuze stated that it was necessary to create properly cinematic concepts, concepts immanent to cinema itself) and make them cut across Deleuze’s thought and open onto an outside – a work of transversality. Perhaps. And this is a big perhaps – hasn’t this already been attempted by Deleuzers and Deleuzeans alike? And wasn’t Deleuze himself creating concepts which were immanent to his thought and which would allow him to cut across his thought, recreate it, so that it could make attempts at opening onto an outside, onto an unthought in his thought?

THE plane of immanence, the One-All is the Open. The Open is conceived through time, and thought opens itself onto unthought by the use of time. Uses of time?