Vital Strategies Part One

The Problem of Being

Questions in philosophy and thought more generally rely on the existence of various objects of thought. Any question one can think of relies on various concepts developed and in constant flux throughout history. The existence of any concept or object relies moreover on existence, or in other words being. This does not have to mean that the object has to exist physically, as we often deal with questions found within an obviously theoretical terrain. For instance the question of how different ideas one possesses relate had little relevance to actual physical objects. One could not point out the various theoretical ideas one has within our empirical observations, within physical experience. Furthermore, questions can be very rooted within physicality. Let's say one is engaging in a common task of the everyday, say a question of how to most easily complete a task. Here too we refer to various concepts that we use to stratify experience. This reveals two things. For one we can see that the situations we come about throughout our lives are always experienced through the mediation of various concepts and notions of objects both theoretical and physical. Along with this and more importantly to us, these objects rely on being. This is not necessarily an arbitrary prioritization of presence, as Derrida would critique¹, as we often deal with objects that are not present whatsoever (being does not rely on presence). However whenever we deal with these objects they always have a presence theoretically within our world of concepts, within the virtual. Say we deal with something that no longer exists or is yet to exist. It is clearly not present yet our idea of it is still clearly there through the act of referring to it within the positing of the idea. Thus to tackle any question we must first deal with the question of being, how does any object exist and what does it mean to exist? This applies even to questions posited by various philosophers as primary and prior to any metaphysical question (this is after all an oxymoron). Even if we cannot separate being as a metaphysical object from the beings we find constantly in flux and in a process of redefinition, we still need to find what being implies as a milieu prior to any questions of an existential character (questions related to my being). Take Camus’ famous question of suicide. Camus writes: 

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories comes afterwards. Those are games; one must first answer this”²

Now this is a deathly serious question, one that is clearly sensible to prioritize from an existential standing. For while one can deal with this question before dealing with the question of being, and one is surely advised to do so if the question seems pressing, to fully contend with the question, or any question for that matter, we must deal with the objects it places in question. After all, if we are to take Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of philosophy seriously³, the interplay and creation of concepts, we must first consider the objects in question. How can we use concepts to formulate questions? How do we have these conceptual objects representing physical phenomna or even purely virtual forms? Questions of an existential nature first require a grounding of the subject in its being. How can we think through how one is to be without first considering being itself? The same prioritization of the means of expression follows from Derrida’s hermeneutics⁴, in which he shows how all relates back to the text, the medium by which these questions are asked. Now Camus would very much disagree with this, as would a figure such as Heidegger, as instead he would place being and life before the medium of the question. This of course explains his prioritization of life philosophy and the problem of meaning and suicide. Now both are quite right here, as while we are born into a world of concepts we first encounter our own being and life. However when it comes to the question, in which concepts are the philosophical building blocks, clearly the objects themselves must first be investigated for a full and complete understanding, if such a thing is ever reachable. 

The most famous attempt to resolve this question is of course the work of Descartes. Perhaps the most famous phrase in all of philosophy is his own, “cogito ergo sum.”⁵ This of course translates to I think therefore I am. Descartes attempts to deal with the problem of one’s being by stating that in the act of doubting one’s existence one has to exist. After all, to doubt must require an individual to be doubting in the first place. Though Descartes is very right in his proof of one’s being, he makes a crucial mistake by prioritizing the cogito over any other form of action. Thought is merely an action among many, each of which is but a unique expression of being. To walk is to be, no matter if one cannot find the true mode of this being. So is to talk, or to do any action for that matter. Deleuze is right to note that Descartes’ proclamation of the cogito over any other action as proof of being is telling. This artificial prioritization of thought or the cogito comes out of Descartes’ mind-body dualism. He sees actions of a physical manner as somehow lesser than those of the mind, as the mind is viewed as something internal to one’s being. On the other hand, physical action is seen as in the realm of what Kant would later call representation, it is somehow outside of what constitutes me-ness. This division has been criticized by a long line of thinkers beginning from Husserl to Derrida and thus will not be spoken about much further. What is important is that before any action there must be being, being being here separated from beings. It is being not of any object thereof, as that would be to presuppose some object, but instead a detached being. That is not to say we can ever encounter being without any substance or intensity (a truly castrated body without organs), but rather that being does not at its base ontology depend on objects. What we call objects are conceptualized through a stratification of an immanent pre-objective category of being. Heidegger follows a very similar logic to establish what he calls dasein⁶. Dasein roughly translates to our being and is Heidegger’s “answer” to the problem of being. Heidegger attempts to go to being itself, a being not attached to any object. As such his final goal is to deal with a proper being-as-itself. However, his magnum opus, Being and Time, was never finished and instead focuses on a particular instance of being, dasein. Dasein interrogates being in the context of the individual’s being in the world, an individual and its contextualization. He does not, or at least attempts to not, make being dependent on any conceptual structure. In doing so he attempts to avoid any metaphysical commitments or foundations, as he views being as prior to any conceptual play. His later hermeneutics sheds further light on this by placing metaphysical systems in a historical context. Yet Heidegger ultimately contradicts himself, engaging in what Derrida calls a metaphysics of presence. Being to Heidegger is the physical being of the object, its being there within an existential situation. But being is not reliant on a crude materialism, it is not constrained by the division between the physical and conceptual. Being is instead the grounding category behind experience. This is not to state there is an a priori category or structure behind experience, being as a concept is like all concepts created after the fact, rather being-as-itself grounds experience. To engage in a metaphysics of presence is to separate being into a dualism of the virtual and the actual. This metaphysics has dominated Western philosophy since the days of Plato. It places the presence of an object on a more privileged plane than the absence of an object. Absence is always deferred in its conceptualization, as to think of what is absent is to give it being in the virtual. The only way to ground absence is with a dualism.

This issue crucially emerges in Heidegger’s hermeneutics, in which Heidegger starts with being and then goes on to analyze the text from the grounding point of being. Being in Heidegger, despite having a metaphysics of how one relates to the world, assumes itself to be outside of the text (being-as itself is outside of the text as it expresses no metaphysics of relations). Derrida instead uses the concepts of trace and differánce, from which he works instead in the radical absence of the other. Trace is not clearly defined for this exact reason, as that would be to work within this same metaphysics of presence. Instead, the trace is what is revealed in deconstruction, it is the metaphysics of presence of some dominant signifier within a particular text. Of course for Heidegger we could apply this same analysis to dasein, being the dominant signifier of being. Due to the concept of trace, Derrida deploys what he calls differánce. Differánce is also not clearly conceptualized, for the same reason as the trace. In simplest terms, differánce is the essential difference found between the signifier and the signified, working withes the trace’s mapping of conceptualization. Differánce is how concepts come to be defined, though of course alienated from their signifieds, through differentiation from other concepts. This is derived from the structuralist semiotics of Saussure, though far more developed via the acknowledgment of the limits of the structure. The first aspect of differánce is analogous to Lacan’s real, Deleuze and Guattari’s intensity, Stirner’s unique, etc. This point, the deferral of the represented behind a given sign/concept, is very common in structuralist and post-structuralist semiotics. The second aspect of differánce is what allows Derrida to engage in a hermeneutics more radical than Heidegger. Instead of revealing the text from being, as Heidegger does, Derrida reveals being from the text. This is but another instance of Derrida’s deconstructive approach where he again reveals the text as totalizing over all expression and assertion. Yet what is revealed by differánce is that there is a something, though lost through our entry into the text and the realm of concepts, that is the lost signified to dasein. This signified, the alienated essence of being, cannot be described by a conceptualization in the rigid sense but rather must be described as a category representing experience more generally. For even if the signified is lost through our entrance into the text it is still directly experienced in an alienated form within conceptualization. The pre-conceptual, the being before its alienation by conceptualization, thus becomes our primary goal. To Derrida this is impossible, for as a literary theorist he must begin in the realm of the text, yet from direct experience we know that this is not the case. Much like how Zeno’s paradox, beyond its clear mathematical solution, can be solved merely by walking, the problem of being’s resolution begins through our direct experience of life itself. The text and conceptualization in the broader sense indeed totalizes over all philosophical expression, yet by denying conceptualization as the basis of experience we can perhaps explore a metaphysics that does not rely on representation.

The lost signified of dasein shall be called being-as-itself, as it is necessarily being without a direct conceptualized object. Heidegger and other members of the phenomenological tradition used many terms to designate various situations being found itself in. For instance Heidegger’s dasein uses many similar phrases, such as being-there or being-in-the-world. Sartre uses the being-in-itself, originally derived from Kant’s thing in itself or noumena, the being-for-itself, etc. Husserl also of course uses many similar phrases, as do many other notable philosophers. Each of these descriptions or characterizations of being are conceptualized categories of the preconceptual. Of course for any metaphysical discussion this is crucial, as concepts are fundamental to metaphysics and any broader investigative discourse. However if we are to grapple with Derrida’s evaluation of phenomenology, along with further questions on the role of the subject, we must exit the realm of pure metaphysics. Now of course a creative metaphysics could be engaged in, such as Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism (to analyze what escapes as affect between different conceptualizations or representations)⁷, however we must go even further. The pre-conceptual must become the realm of discussion, we have to not only look at the limits of representation but what escapes it or even goes outside of it. This is of course being-as-itself, being without a direct stratified mode of being. For concepts are not fundamental, they are created and accepted by individuals and the wider social context. Some are freely created while some are imposed via outside forces. After all, the norms of the wider social apparatus pressure individuals into constructing themselves and their broader worldview along certain predetermined lines. Being-as-itself refuses to conceptualize different modes of being but instead represents the preconceptual being experienced directly in our subjective experience through a deferral. It acts as a placeholder for the direct experience of being. This, despite not describing any specific experience, does not totalize all experiences of being into some conceptual set. It is not a transcendent category describing all experiences of being, some set of all possible beings or instances of experiencing said beings, but instead is an empty category that defers to said experiences. It is not a zero point behind all experience, as the planes of Deleuze and Guattari are (it has no conception of form), but rather is the before behind all conceptualization. It makes no attempts for transcendent description, but rather is derived as the lost signified behind being. 

Now despite its intent as the answer to the question of being, being-as-itself has very little real explanative power. This is intentional, as all conceptual answers to the question of being inevitably enter into the realm of representative thinking. Despite attempts to resist representational thinking found in thinkers such as Deleuze and Laruelle, any answer found in the realm of thought, i.e. any describable answer, immediately falls prey to the pitfalls of representation. Deleuze seeks to avoid representation by using notions such as the rhizome, the war machine, and pre-conceptual difference, which displace dogmatism and representation through separating any given object from any platonic ideal that seeks to express the limit of the objects expression. However, they cannot escape representation while remaining within philosophy. Of course as strategies these escape through the same process of deferral (the war machine displaces representational logic by disrupting any instance of stratification, the rhizome explores from the middle of any given milieu, etc)⁸, yet as concepts they offer no true grounding for what an outsideness implies. Philosophy after all is the discipline of concepts, which are defined through their representative reduction. Laruelle engages in an approach more familiar to what is attempted through being-as-itself, that is the avoidance of conceptual description. Laruelle’s human for instance is the opposite of Feuerbach’s transcendent humanism. Feuerbach creates a transcendent figure of the human in the same vein of the christian god he vigorously critiqued⁹. As such his humanism is merely a pious atheism, one that creates the same kind of alienation he opposed so vehemently. On the contrary Laruelle makes no attempt to describe the human, instead using it as a placeholder for the direct experience of the human. It can refer to any human and gives no description of their nature or any limitation on what they might do¹⁰. This is done in order to orient philosophy, or rather non-philosophy, towards unique humans themselves and their given particular realities. It is perhaps the closest a “humanism” has gotten to escaping its biopolitical critique. While Laruelle’s project is an interesting one, though at times falling to the pitfalls of humanism more broadly, it runs into a similar problem to being-as-itself. Due to these issues another notion must be introduced, connotation. Connotation “connotates” existence, gives it a particular affect. If being-as-itself does not attempt to refer to any specific experience of being, connotation refers to different direct experiences of being. It is a connotation of being-as-itself, an intensity if you will. This does not mean that connotation is stratified into different segmented connotations. After all our own experiences of being cannot be clearly separated into discernable moments of being. Bergeson¹¹, Deleuze¹², and later Land¹³ show that any account time described by stratified moments is inherently faulty (one can of course emphasize given moments as a singularity, as Proust does, however that does not change the flowing nature of both time and memory). All experience of a moment relies on the knowledge and contextualization of what has come before. This recall of the past and connection into a cohesive experience relies upon far more than the present moment. The moment, the event, is lost within the flow of becoming. All assertions of moments as moments or events (not as singularities or situations in the sense of Debord¹⁴) are themselves conceptual, designated as separate after the fact. Connotation is fundamentally a multiplicity, as all different experiences rely on other experiences to properly contextualize them. This contextualization is part of the overall experience of the connotation, connotation is always immanent in its experience to other instances of connotation. Different connotations can be experienced simultaneously, both in the traditional notion of the moment and through Bergeson’s notion of time. Of course connotation does not rely on any individualized experience, as while subjectivity is always immanent to experience the subject in its western form is a construction placed over experience. Connotations differentiate between each other of course, but it is not a conceptual relative difference. Neither is there some hegelian contradiction placed within experience, as connotation is purely assertive. Rather its difference is a preconceptual difference similar to the one found in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. There is an unstratified difference found between connotations, a difference found in the passage of repetition. Connotation cannot be stratified, it is unrepresentable without reducing it. Even in the act of writing on it we are drawn further from the connotation of our subject matter, though through the act of writing we find new connotations, new affects. This is very similar to Lacan’s category of the real, the real being what is lost when we enter into the realm of signifiers and language. As was noted previously, this observation is very similar to that of Derrida through differánce and Deleuze through the plane of immanence. However Lacan does not take this observation into the logical extremes of post-structuralism, as he makes the real a category that doesn’t apply to the imaginary and symbolic. To rephrase, he remains stuck in a plane of transcendence rather than moving towards a plane of consistency or immanence. Lacan’s real should instead be used to destroy the structure he creates, as while the original real is lost when we enter into signifiers, each signifier and the associated conception can be reduced back into the realm of the real, into the realm of connotation. This being said the category of the real still has practical relevance, as is shown through Newman’s utilization of the category for liberatory politics in From Bakunin to Lacan¹⁵ (though he engages in a similar deconstruction). This is done as the real escapes the logic of place, something that eludes many post-structuralist thinkers.

Of course no proper exploration of connotation would be complete without an exploration of what reduces it. This representational reduction is done through the process of conceptualization. Conceptualization is the process of creating concepts for various connotations. Now of course the vision of connotation we have just established is seen through the various facets of being that we experience. It is clear that concepts can deal with many different things beyond what is directly experienced. Take for instance transcendent concepts, noumena in the terms of Kant. These concepts are beyond our direct phenomenological experience. If this is so apparent how does conceptualization represent and stratify only connotations? Connotation has a range of applications beyond phenomenological experience, as the traditional realm of phenomenology is very limited. Each concept one can think of is experienced in the process of thought. Even if the conceptual realm is traditionally separated from phenomenology it is directly experienced. Each concept’s “essence”, which is freely manipulated by both individuals and wider society, is experienced through both thought and the understanding of the concept. Thus concepts can be dealt with in phenomenological terms, they can be understood as merely connotations. Transformed connotations mind you, as through conceptualization we are alienated from the direct experience of what the concept seeks to represent. This observation of conceptualization’s reduction back into the realm of connotation is the same movement Deleuze and Guattari make with their notion of the plane of immanence. The plane of immanence reduces all concepts, which in their representational process are transcendent, back into the realm of immanence by denying their transcendence. They realize that all transcendence is necessarily artificial. Even still concepts are not fundamental, they are created out of the realm of unmediated connotation. Each concept necessarily holds a long genealogy of various manipulations of purpose by various groups and individuals. Conceptualization is after all a process, it cannot be reduced to any one moment or being. Concepts hold no transcendent event, even if we seek to find a stable foundation, they are always in the process of becoming. Various philosophers who possess anti-foundationalist sensibilities have theorized different processes of conceptualization. Stirner for instance posited his notion of the creative nothing in his magnum opus The Unique and Its Property¹⁶. The creative nothing is a starting point behind all conceptualization, crucially focusing on self creation. It is not a literal nothingness in the sense of non-being, but it is instead an unmediated and unstratified being. It is the realm of various connotations, of being-as-itself. This nothingness is creative, as from it concepts are created to stratify the world. Stratification in the sense of concept creation is a creative enterprise, as Deleuze and Guattari realize in their notion of philosophy as concept creation. Now Stirner theorizes concept creation, and by proxy self creation, as an individual enterprise. This does not mean he denies that society at large has a role in concept creation, but rather his wider philosophy is focused on the perspective of individual subjectivity. Individuals can freely manipulate what a concept means to them at will, along with creating new concepts. However individuals are, to use Heideggerian terms, thrown into a world of preexisting conceptions. When one is born we find a world that has already created concepts and as such we pragmatically accept their preexisting meaning. Things such as Foucault’s subjectification have weight here, as while individuals can freely develop their conception of self, society as a whole in its biopolitical structures has a large amount of influence on our identity and how that identity manifests within the wider workings of society¹⁷. To fully explore this the nature of the subject itself has to be considered. Concept creation in the wider social operates in the same manner as the creative nothing, as from the aconceptual connotation it stratifies and creates representations. Individuals have subjective investments within this social, each influencing our broader pragmatic conceptions. These conceptions develop into norms which constrain individuals at a biopolitical level. Any resistance against these norms, alongside the entirety of our contemporary biopolitical condition, will undoubtedly come at the level of connotation and a refusal of representation more broadly.

1. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

2. Camus, Albert. 1942. The Myth of Sisyphus. Éditions Gallimard.

3. Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. 2015. What Is Philosophy? London ; New York: Verso.

4. Derrida, Jacques. 1967. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

5. Descartes, René. 1641. Meditations on First Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.

6. Heidegger, Martin. (1927) 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell.

7. Deleuze, Gilles. (1968) 2014. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Bloomsbury.

8. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London [U.A.] Bloomsbury.

9. Ludwig Feuerbach, and George Eliot. 1989. The Essence of Christianity. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

10. François Laruelle, Jessie Hock, and Dubilet. 2018. A Biography of Ordinary Man: On Authorities and Minorities. Cambridge, Uk ; Malden, Ma: Polity Press.

11. Bergson, Henri. 2018. Matter and Memory. London: Forgotten Books.

12. Gilles Deleuze. 1988. Bergsonism. Princeton University Press.

13. Nick Land. 2018. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Falmouth: Urbanomic ; New York.

14. Debord, Guy. 1977. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red.

15. Newman, Saul. 2001. From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books.

16. Max Stirner. 2018. The Unique and Its Property. Berkeley, California: Ardent Press.

17. Michel Foucault. 1982. “The Subject and Power”