Serpentine Circularity and the Eternal Return
François Laruelle
In Phénomène et différence. Essai sur l’ontologie de Ravaisson (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1971), p.92-99
The serpentine line “organizes” differences, but this organization is not their subsumption under organic representation. The point is not their classification but their pictural expression: they are not the object of a biological philosophy, but an aesthetic and non-conceptual experience. Differences are not inscribed in language and in a philosophy of categories, not even in a biological discourse, but taking account of the gesture of the absolute expressing itself and the gesture of grace, as well as confirming it moreover through the mediation of habitude. It is in the dynamic environs of the gesture, in the ontological element of movement, that the serpentine line appears as a sort of organization but also as a repetition of differences.
The serpentine line as repetition suits that which the philosophy of difference puts on repetition a motif of decoration, which is not without evoking the snaking [serpentement] of the living being:
a figure is reproduced while the concept remains absolutely identical … However, this is not how artists proceed in reality. They do not juxtapose instances of the figure, but rather each time combine an element of one instance with another element of a following instance. They introduce a disequilibrium into the dynamic process of construction, an instability, a dissymmetry or gap of some kind which disappears only in the overall effect.[1]
The creative gesture of the artist as a spiritual automaton reproduces the movement of the Principle expressing itself within grace, as the productive grace of differences: the flexuous line is not the juxtaposition of differential or individual moments identical under the same concept. The “defect” of symmetry[2] is the positive character which gives it its movement. The serpentine line cannot be born in a homogenous milieu, in the material “empire of immediation,” in the space of ideality without differences. The critique of geometric ideality to the benefit of the differential element of life and grace will confirm that “it is not the elements of symmetry present which matter for artistic or natural causality, but those which are missing and are not in the cause; what matters is the possibility of the cause having less symmetry than the effect. Moreover, causality would remain eternally conjectural, a simple logical category, if that possibility were not at some moment or other effectively fulfilled.”[3] The serpentine line must not be seized as the overall effect formed from the repetition of curved segments, but in its movement through which the living being expresses themselves, a movement of expression which is also a twist of grace. This twist, undoubtedly inseparable from the expression, is a “kind” of movement that thought cannot master. Perhaps the twist in this sense is the very origin of movement or the manifestation of its ontological element. The serpentine line is the spiral of life, the expression of the Principle aspiring towards manifesting itself, the tension created by the outcrop of the noumenon in the phenomenon. The noumenon cannot manifest itself in finite, isolated, dispersed determinations, in differences of understanding, but it can manifest itself in a movement which twists over itself: the serpentine grace expresses the “sufferings” of the birth of the Principle, its difficult coming into the World. The mortal beauty of grace encompasses the “patience” and passion of the Principle. Its expression is at the same time its consummation and the sublime death of things, their fading away in Being.
However, between “cadence-repetition” and “rhythm-repetition”[4] of movement of how a living being generates itself, there is not exactly this difference alone that the first would presuppose the Same, absent from the second. Grace is not exclusive of the Same or unity: it is the aesthetic solution of the problem of the one and the multiple, the aesthetic version of participation. Ravaisson only seizes difference at the level of its integration in a whole. This does not mean in space, for the gracious movement generates space as the well-founded phenomenon of the Principle. The Same of difference is not the Same of the concept: it is not juxtaposed with differences, but differences and the Same reciprocally belong and affirm each other. Unity can only affirm differences through the movement, and differences can only suffer the Same in grace, which is thus the last ontological synthesis. Organization through grace is opposed to the anarchic and maddening distribution[5] of differences. In this case, if they distribute themselves over the extent of univocal Being, they are distinct, separated elements that aspire towards confusion and aspire towards “introducing” confusion. Difference as a demoniac principle, as an agitated plurality, remains “flat”: only diversity, which is given, can thus agitate and be agitated (by a subjectivity) despite the attempts of difference thus conceived to distinguish itself from:
There is a hierarchy which measures beings according to their limits, and according to their degree of proximity or distance from a principle. But there is also a hierarchy which considers things and beings from the point of view of power: it is not a question of considering absolute degrees of power, but only of knowing whether a being eventually ‘leaps over’ or transcends its limits in going to the limit of what it can do, whatever its degree.[6]
Grace excludes isolated, anarchic difference which would like itself to be both a plastic principle and a transcendental principle. Difference taken within the synthesis of grace is undoubtedly a plastic principle, but it has nothing of the transcendental for it responds to no Idea. The relations of difference and the Same in the serpentine line cannot also be those of the relations of difference-determination and Being conceived as univocal: “The essential in univocity is not that Being is said in a single and same sense, but that it is said, in a single and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities.”[7] And “the universal is said of the most singular independently of any mediation…With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference.”[8] What we have called empirical difference (which is the determination or the difference “made” through a dissimulated subjectivity or through the operation of an understanding that correlates this determination and its Idea) seems to us to lead to this complex conceptual formula that is quite foreign to the simplicity of the movement where one Being (which is difference alone, which is as difference) and differences which are not in one Being are articulated where, however, there are only differences. These relations are relations of the understanding and, in relation to the serpentine line, in relation to the simple expression of the Principle, to transcendent intellectual constructions. For example, in grace, it is impossible to express oneself thus: the identical is said of the different, Being is said of difference, etc. This attribution, which constitutes the identical or Being in some sorts as transcendentals, requires a transcendent exercise of thought, as if representation would like to think through and against itself that which differs from it entirely: difference. By contrast, grace is the Same, but it is not said of differences. Grace is not a transcendental principle: grace is the effective synthesis of differences, the unavoidable synthesis which discharges the understanding and the philosophy of understanding.
This “law” of differences in the Ravaissonian universe is nothing other than the grounds that expresses itself. No doubt, it is the master of difference in the middle of everything, in the middle of the infinite unity (orgic representation), which prevents the extreme liberation of difference, the anarchy of difference. This thought is situated on the plane if not of vision, at least the plane of seeing which already represents for the conception of free and wild difference as a sort of “superstructure” and flattener of difference, difference’s refraction and its disguising in the strata of vision. However, if this reprisal of difference in orgic representation in the Leibnizian fashion is undeniable – the liberty of the principle or the ground remains infinitely greater than in Leibniz: with no limit, there is no limitation of finite beings, if at least the ground is seized as expressing itself within individual beings. Not only is there not negation, but the limit itself is only present there in the evanescent state and as that which is suppressed. The curved line of grace is not the limitation of a finite being, but the effort of the principle to express itself in a difference.
On the other hand, this conception can only be if not defended, at least preserved from any facile critique, if the opposite conception of difference is shown as that which it is: an abstract hypothesis that is outside [sortie] of the world of representation. The isolated determination of its disguises that it gives being and presence to is an abstraction, a hypothesis issued from representation and projected towards the “foundation” of all domains of representation. Ravaisson does not intellectually reconstruct difference nor does he produce a concept of difference, but he seizes difference immediately, “phenomenologically,” in the domain where it appears without having need to be reconstructed: the serpentine grace. Obviously, seen through determination, organized difference can pass as mastered by orgic representation, but to want to seize it elsewhere and in a genuinely pure and elementary state is perhaps nothing but an abstraction that produces a hypothetical concept, which would confirm the necessity where thought seeks difference-determination uniquely in a discussion of the philosophies and sciences, the milieu of representation par excellence. As seized in art and nature, rather, difference is the place of a critique of philosophies. The interest of a thought like Ravaisson’s on art is that precisely it is at the limit of philosophy and attempts to cross the threshold of representation.
Grace both avoids the undetermined and the indifferenciated, but also the negative. It’s obviously the first point that appears subject to caution: but the Principle is not separated from differences where it expresses itself. The serpentine line will appear like a pondered and “moderated” form of the eternal return. A “median” form which, differently from “its strict or categorical position,”[9] lets the “supple” identity of grace to subsist and does not bring the forms of being to their superior degree where they would metamorphose into one another. However, this interpretation would not be entirely exact for the concept of the “immediate givens of manifestation,” not more than the eternal return, “allows no installation of a foundation-ground. On the contrary, it swallows up or destroys every ground which would function as an instance responsible for the difference between the original and the derived.”[10] What’s more, the graceful snaking is anterior to the scission of representation. Then does it represent a sort of “median” between the circularity of the eternal return and the circularity of the dialectic? Is it “conservative”? Already, serpentine circularity is not the perfect dialectical circle that resolves itself in identity. It seems to situate itself between extreme forms of the circle: “There is indeed a circular dialectical selection, but one which always works to the advantage of that which is conserved in infinite representation – that which bears and that which is born. The selection works in reverse, and mercilessly eliminates whatever would render the circle tortuous or shatter the transparenc[y] of memory.”[11]
The least that we can say is that grace enters badly into the schema of opposition between Difference and representation. But grace, through some of its aspects, rejoins the eternal return and its decentered circularity: “For if eternal return is a circle, then Difference is at the centre and the Same is only on the periphery: it is a constantly decentred, continually tortuous circle which revolves only around the unequal.”[12] However, graceful though decentered circularity is not tortuous, differently from the ugly and lame circularity of the eternal return. In Ravaisson, it is not difference which is at the center of the circle or the snaking movement: it is the whole that winds by integrating the detail of differences. In the face of this synthesis which has the merit of being “harmonious” and coherent, because it is grounded on the expression and univocity of the notion of difference, we more difficultly see how the passage from difference-determination to the Eternal Return is carried out. The first is issued from perception and even constitutes the elementary structure of sensation, while the second is a thought that concerns difference in general and is supposed to be valid for several types of differences, in particular difference as the extreme form or “superior degree” or “superior form” of that which is: does having to bring into play very diverse types of differences not risk being a formal thought? It is because this extreme form can identify itself with difference-determination which is issued from the understanding: “The extreme is not the identity of opposites, but rather the univocity of the different; the superior form is not the infinite, but rather the eternal formlessness of the eternal return itself, throughout its metamorphoses and transformations.”[13] Obviously, the serpentine line has nothing of a selection of superior forms which negates everything of which can be negated. It is rather closer to the “infinite form,” no doubt, but it here gains its visible, concrete, and aesthetic character – while the Eternal Return, the extreme and radical thought, is a remote thought threatened by abstraction if it must be said of the plurality of differences and their types. Being like the eternal return does not want to be neutral, but is not the concept of the eternal return as a transcendental principle neutral? Its formal character responds to the abstract character of difference as determination, as “ultimate unity.”
There are two conceptions of difference that are opposed to each other: a difference that is conceived aesthetically, seized at the level of grace and beauty, and a difference which is issued (according to us) from the understanding, an origin that it can only renounce to the extent where it wants to be sub-representative. “Determination” is the representation of the sub-representative – a purely conceptual contradiction. However, taken from aesthetics, differences is not what reigns in the picture and “deforms” any passive representation. In this sense, the Ravaissonian picture or sculpture are not Leibnizian, they do not presuppose the multiplicity of points of view:
Infinite representation includes precisely an infinity of representations – either by ensuring the convergence of all points of view on the same object or the same world, or by making all moments properties of the same Self. In either case it maintains a unique centre which gathers and represents all the others, like the unity of a series which governs or organizes its terms and their relations once and for all. The fact is that infinite representation is indissociable from a law which renders it possible: the form of the concept as a form of identity which constitutes on the one hand the in-itself of the represented (A is A) and on the other hand the for-itself of the representant (Self = Self).[14]
However, aesthetic grace, as we will have the occasion to demonstrate it, eliminates the identity of subjectivity like the identity of the object. Grace does not return to a cogito, but not more to deformations, extractions, divergences in the work of art and tear things apart. Such an affirmation of divergence as the structure of the sub-representative presupposes the utterly atomic character of always elementary and on the way to “differ” difference. This difference, whose nature wants it to be elusive to representation, can no longer be but posed as a transcendental principle, abstractly thought as principle. The eternal return can only undergo the same fate: being elevated to the dignity of transcendental principle. But this excess of honour is accompanied by an excess of indignity: its elevation is also its irrealization, its fall into the neutrality of intellectual thought, into the indifferenciated milieu of thought, into the homogeneous ether of representation. In fact, movement is essential to differences conceived through expression. It is precisely movement that makes differences not of the order of sensation, not of differences felt and doomed to nomadism and errancy but expressed differences. Graceful movement renders useless the position of the eternal return as the movement and law of empirical differences. The snaking is the same, but which does not project the form of identity within the differential movements of grace. “In reality, the distinction between the same and the identical bears fruit only if one subjects the Same to a conversion which relates it to the different, while at the same time the things and beings which are distinguished in the different suffer a corresponding radical destruction of their identity.”[15] Grace does not “destroy” identity: it softens identity and makes it movable. The genuine problem is the following: are the “destruction” or “reversal” of Identity concepts that are susceptible to carry out a genuine philosophical “change of terrain,” or are they only the opposites of representation produced by it? Is the volatilization of things into simulacra another thing than a hypothetic concept, a paradox of representation? Is the plane to lay destruction to the principle of Being and break each identical thing to the point of rupture where it becomes its simulacra another thing than the proper need for a thought already taken in reified representation forgetful of the “moving” reality of beauty and grace? This is the failure of the original synthesis which makes thought fall into the paradoxes of difference. If identity is an illusion proper to difference, would not the simulacrum be the dream proper to dead and finite identity? Is not the understanding that dreams of a colored and glimmering world of simulacra like the fantastic projection of its grisaille? Does not the concept of simulacrum destroy itself when it is brough to the absolute, ab-solved of all enrootment within an identical being an torn from the imaginary that is its element? “Along the broken chain or the tortuous ring we are violently led from the limit of sense to the limit of thought, from what can only be sensed to what can only be thought.”[16] The thought of difference and the eternal return is a thought made of paradoxes. It is a thought where representation collides with its own limit, difference, as with its passion: but what is a paradoxical thought worth, one that by definition recuses any norm, any exterior point of view in relation to which it could be judged? As it cannot be judged, it can no longer be justified, and it is always able to dismiss it with the wave of the hand: by definition, it won’t even be able to invoke a non-representative given like grace, it won’t be able to renounce the traditional forms of philosophical thought. However, let it be understood that this appreciation of the thought that is expressed in Difference and Repetition has no value “in itself,” but is alone issued from the given of aesthetic grace and the point of view of the serpentine line. It is only within the Ravaissonian perspective that a thought of difference as transcendental principle falls into abstraction on par with Platonism, what it claims to reverse.
[1] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.31 [trans. Paul Patton
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.19 – Trans.]
[2] This “objective” dissymmetry must be distinguished from the dissymmetry characteristic of representation and subjectivity and where it was previously a question.
[3] Ibid, p.31 [p.20 – Trans.]
[4] Ibid, p.33 [p.21 – Trans.]
[5] Ibid, p.54-55 [p.37-38 – Trans.]
[6] Ibid, p.55 [p.37 – Trans.]
[7] Ibid, p.53 [p.36 – Trans.]
[8] Ibid, p.57 [p.39 – Trans.]
[9] Ibid, p.92 [p.67 – Trans.]
[10] Ibid, p.92. [p.67 – Trans.]
[11] Ibid, p.76 [p.54 – Trans.]
[12] Ibid, p.78 [p.55 – Trans.]
[13] Ibid, p.77 [p.55 – Trans.]
[14] Ibid, p.79 [p.56 – Trans.
[15] Ibid, p.91 [p.66 – Trans.]
[16] Ibid, p.313 [p.243 – Trans.]
en-demic 