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February 26, 2006
This quote is courtesy of Enowning. It is from an essay entitled, 'The Transformation of the Sense of Dasein in Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)', by Miguel Beistegui that was published in Research in Phenomenology Vol. 33 , no 1., 2003.
Beistegui says:
At the heart of being lies the following contradiction, which representational thought—metaphysics—has continuously and consistently overlooked: being “is” not; it is, literally, nothing. For “is” or “are” only those things—those beings—that can be represented, only those beings with a minimal structure of identity and permanence such that they can be identified and recognized by way of nouns, or substantives. In one way or another, beings are substances, or derived from substances, or attached and attributed to substances.
Isn't this questioning and displacing of being as substance what Deleuze is doing when he argues that difference and repetition have a reality that is independent of the concepts of sameness, identity, resemblance, similarity, or equivalence?
If becoming is the operation of self-differentiation, the elaboration of a difference within a thing, a quality or a system that emerges only in duration, then we still have the thing, don't we? Things, in their specificity and generality, are the effects of difference, but difference is not reducible to things insofar as it is the process that produces things and the reservoir from which they derive.
It is an undermining of the stability of fixed objects and states and his affirmation of the vibratory continuity of the material universe as a whole, that is, developing a philosophy of movement and change.
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It's only been in the last few days, thanks to posts such as this one, that I've appreciated how deeply Deleuze accepts the ontological distinction (between entities and being) -- and what he does with it. Deleuze gives the ontological distinction a materialist twist -- so that Being (as difference) is a pre-ontic domain of singularities and forces. Might one say that Deleuze's ontology is in effect a response to Heidegger that recasts ontology, not as phenomenology, but as a sort of "noumenology"?