Deleuze's rhapsody of the surface makes a strong impression in my mind, but it comes with a puzzle I can't quite piece together (The Logic of Sense, "Second Series of Paradoxes of Surface Effects"). I am impressed by the argument that depth has been illogically privileged over the superficial. Depth is not customarily viewed as a lack of breadth, as being of small surface, so either we should not think of the superficial as a lack of depth or we should rethink depth as lacking breadth. Deleuze calls profound Paul Valéry's idea that "what is most deep is the skin" (p. 10), however for Deleuze surfaces are incorporeal. Like Lucretius, he uses a distinction between conjuncta and eventa, and he has an idea of the simulacrum ("the faint incorporeal mist which escapes from bodies," ibidem), but he is well aware that he departs from the Epicureans in regarding such eminations as exactly incorporeal (pp. 335-336, endnote No. 4). Reading the Stoics, and in particular Émile Bréhier's study of the Stoics, Deleuze radically splits being from event, causes from effects, depths from surfaces, the present from the time of becoming. Events are incorporeal surface effects, never present but always becoming, never causes but quasi-causes at best. This I find puzzling.
I recall the trouble I had digesting Marion's argument for the anteriority of the effect. Marion also places the effect with the event, but according to him the time of the event is the present. Is this present a phenomenological present which contains within it protentions and retentions, or is this present more like the present that has never been past, or the present that has never been future? In any case the temporality of Deleuze's event is meant to be immediately paradoxical. "The event is coexstensive with becoming, and becoming is itself coextensive with language; the paradox is thus essentially a 'sorites,' that is a series of interrogative propositions which, following becoming, proceed through successive additions and retrenchments" (p. 8). (I think the sorites paradox is less a paradox than a math game that confuses the indefinite with the infinite.) So I am puzzled by what seems to be an ontological scission of cause and effect, and the notion of event with a different temporality than the body. I wonder why the event doesn't capture all temporality, and the answer seems to be tied up with the fact that it is only being considered as an effect.
"The genius of a philosophy," Deleuze writes, "must first be measured by the new distribution it imposes on beings and concepts" (p. 6). I don't agree that this is the measure for all philosophy, but perhaps it is a good measure of Deleuze's project–without thereby reducing his philosophy to his inventiveness in relating beings and concepts. I admire the erudition and creative energy he brings to bear on thinking the surface effect, even if, were I to appropriate the concept, I might not respect the distribution of beings and concepts he has labored to establish.
Labels: Bréhier, causality, Deleuze, Lucretius, Marion, surfaces, Valéry