Deleuze discusses the problematic as the mode of the event and reaches this conclusion: "The relationship between mathematics and man may thus be conceived in a new way: the question is not that of quantifying or measuring human properties, but rather, on the one hand, that of problematizing human events, and, on the other, that of developing as various human events the conditions of a problem" (The Logic of Sense, p. 55).
A word about humanism. I might like to say that I am humanist, in full knowledge of the term's biopolitical incorrectness, simply to be honest. In the first place I am a human being: anatomically bipedal, loquacious, clothed, even in front of my cat. That's what I am. Who I am appears to be a question of affinities, of passionate relations: a cat person, a people person (not so much in practice), an af-fine. Is affinity a problem, something we can throw forward? Is it an event, a surface effect?
Let me backtrack. It's not so easy to define what a human being is. Derrida says, with some intelligence,"The list of properties unique to man always forms a configuration, from the first moment. For that reason, it can never be limited to a single trait and it is never closed; structurally speaking it can attract a nonfinite number of other concepts, beginning with the concept of a concept" ("The Animal That I Am (More to Follow)," pp. 373-374). Here a partisan might say that Derrida has problematized human properties when he should have problematized human events. Well, he has indeed problematized properties. Derrida says paranthetically that what is proper to "man" is "the peculiarity of a man whose property it is not to have anything that is exclusively his" (p. 389). Now I've gone and problematized the human because these authors talk of "man" and that strikes me as only half the story at best. It may be a translation issue, but gender is a problem for humanism whether one chooses to remain neutral or to specify a gender. Is gender a property or an event? If those are the choices, I might lean towards the latter, but I'm still not sure of the mathematical nature of the problem. Derrida says that "thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry" (p. 377). Such thinking problematizes the human, and, I think, develops as human events the conditions of a problem.
Perhaps it is liberating to problematize affinity, for instance, as something other than a property. Perhaps it would lead to healthier relationships. Yet one may still problematize the property, and one may problematize poetically. The body, for instance, can be imagined as something other than a property. Rather than saying that one has a body, one can say that one is one's body, or that one is bodily, or one (em)bodies. I (em)body affinities, passionately. The poetry of lines is never strictly parallel, even in parallelisms. Lines curve and undulate, sounds insinuate and meanings are sinuous with them. To problematize the supple line of poetry is to weave in and out of paradox, or keep to a paradox that is a weaving in and out of belief. Derrida speaks of of a limitrophy whose task for thinking would be "to complicate, thicken, delinearize, fold, and divide the line precisely by making it increase and multiply" (p. 398). He asks, "What are the edges of a limit that grows and multiplies by feeding on an abyss?" I ask, What are the edges of a line that grows and multiplies by plying with another line? We don't need to complicate the poetic line; it's already complicated, already multiple as soon as it's poetry. This is all to suggest that developing affinities as the conditions of a problem may require scansion in addition to or as an alternative to calculus.
Labels: Deleuze, Derrida, humans, line