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Living Dangerously: Kierkegaardian Faith and Deleuzean Becoming

by Jason Flato

This essay has two parts, the first concerns Kierkegaard's religious subject, or knight of faith, which we will interrogate through an analysis of Kierkegaard's theory of truth. As an individual I leap into a particular province of existence in order to be defined as a self, a set of factors that are defined by the stand the structure takes on itself. This, I suggest, risks a narcissism which places the individual over against structures that are constitutive of being in the world. Deleuze, I submit, offers a corrective so that we may turn the volume of Kierkegaard's exaggerated subjectivity down.

So, why look to Deleuze and Guattari? Deleuze and Guattari recast desire as an unqualified affirmation of difference for its own sake, which deterritorializes Kierkegaard's desire rooted in pre-given nature or institutions. So, for one, their "ethology of assemblages" mandates that we look to the larger ecological context and with it, towards the possibility for a multi-leveled embodiment to characterize our existence, rather than as an autonomous agent. This will constitute the second part of this paper, throughout, I will offer some ways in which Deleuze and Guattari provide a corrective.1

I. Kierkegaard's Representationalism in the Postscript2

For Kierkegaard our very existence widens rather than closes the epistemic gap between subject and object. In fact, our existence plots to keep the gap open. Here, Kierkegaard is somewhat in the spirit of Nietzsche, the conditions for intelligibility involves not a step back, but a rejection of the presuppositions that he sees as having plagued philosophy, namely, the conceptual fiction that has posited a pure, will-less, innocuous, timeless knowing subject.3 In contrast to the Nietzchean retrieval of Dionysus as representative of furthering a direct participation in the reality of our finite experience, Kierkegaard remains trapped in representational epistemology. We will concern ourselves here only with the account of subjective knowledge, which presents us with a problem.

Kierkegaard wants to take us beyond the subjectivity of the ego in order to turn the sound up on our self-awareness, if only for fleeting moments. Existence is itself the double movement wherein I conceive of ideas and reduplicate these ideas in reality. Truth, in its actuality, is tied to that type truth which essentially concerns existence. Kierkegaard's assertion that truth is subjectivity pertains only to essential truth. This lies within the sphere of immanence, the possibility of experiencing the eternal within oneself, which occurs in affirming the passion of the paradox.

Subjectively situated, truth concentrates on how I believe as opposed to 'the what' of objectivity.4 Stated succinctly, Kierkegaard's theory of truth has two or three salient points; first, there are two kinds of objective truths, one of which is simply not available to individual 'existers', secondly, the kind of objective truth which is available to us is not an appropriate correspondence to the choice of self in front of God, and finally, this subjection to God, as a mode of existence, is only appropriate in terms of the thesis that truth is subjectivity.5 Truth is realized in existence as acting.

It is here that we come across the Kierkegaardian risk of faith.

Without risk, no faith. Faith is the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am able to apprehend God objectively, I do not have faith; because I cannot do this, I must have faith. If I want to keep myself in faith, I must continually see to it that I hold fast the objective uncertainty(.) (CUP: 204)
In this case, the nature of temporality, in which everything is in a process of becoming ties us to accepting the fallibility of our beliefs. Existence is transcended 'existentially' through a deep incision into my own subjectivity so that I may commit myself to commitments that bear down on my existence. Faith deploys my historicity, partiality and my differences from the universal community as a provocation to my discernment of self. The absurdity that the eternal is to be found in the temporal; this acts as the final basis for my decisions, which are the "highest" of all. This is the manner in which the will wills itself so that in this very act of willing, subject and object are equivalent.

Kierkegaard (ironically) identifies Socratic faith with his thesis 'truth is subjectivity'. The case of Socrates cannot contradict the case of the Christian, in fact subjectivity is fancifully the truth but in actuality is the untruth. The double movement of immanence follows the distinction between 'human being' and 'the Christian.' The Christian is reliant upon the infinite 'breaking' into the temporal order of history to displace our narcissistic claims to self-satisfaction. Although, the 'how', "the relation of the existing person in his very existence, to what is said" (CUP, 169), which supports the deep subjectivity of the subject within radical finitude, almost seems to remove its indistinctness. This indistinctness between the 'what' and the 'how' or the relating of one's existence to oneself is addressed in terms of Religiousness B, which shifts the commitment to something concrete and specific outside of myself.

In Religiousness B it appears that Kierkegaard wants to displace the moral universality dependent on the full presencing of immanent truth by absurdly affirming the Incarnation. In light of this critique of the highest expression of paganism, the metaphysics of presence, it seems as if Kierkegaard would be a harbinger to deconstruction. However, this explication of truth is not deployed.

The subjective reflection is concerned with my relation to my own belief, which still depends broadly on the concept of correspondence. Hence, there is a reliance on semantics and not pragmatics, which is the interpretation of the syntactical formula's variables and uniformity. This amplification of subjectivity only makes sense if we presuppose a notion of correspondence between thought and being, which is the basis for objectivity. Positivistic logic, which identifies facts with syntax, does not, as we have seen for Kierkegaard, tell us anything about the world. The upside is that for Kierkegaard, the beginning of the collapse of any guaranteed correspondence and the shift to the deed, starts to increase the proportion of subjectivity in religious life. The theological enterprise then, is not speculation about God, the temporality of our understanding impedes the possibility of assigning intelligibility to the world as a whole entity.6 In other words, there is a priority over a realist ontology that offers a totalized picture of the world. Yet, Kierkegaard merely resettles the center point of truth by declaring 'truth is subjectivity', but doesn't transgress the metaphysical ideal of truth. Truth immigrates, but only to the edge of town! The moment of transformation from Religiousness A to B may very well instill the conditions for truth, but this movement to subjectivity through the affirmation or certitude of absurdity is dependent upon some objective determination that discloses that at the very least, the possibility of being correct exists. Kierkegaard's Christian functions in a world where there is some conjecture that esteems a correspondence between my avowals and the actuality of such avowals in the external world, when this relation is anchored I can objectively declare that 'I am in the truth'.

The desire for truth is limited by the conceptual apparatus of the form of representational epistemology to which Kierkegaard remains tied. Within this framework the desire turns back on itself when it is pushed to the boundary and suspends its own harvesting for truth. While Kierkegaard may have brought us to the threshold of the post-Nietzchean landscape, we remain at the crossroad of binary structures.

Kierkegaard's knight of faith risks a narcissism in his life of an absolutely augmented subjectivity. The individual is placed over against structures that are constitutive of being in the world. Does the achievement of this type of subjectivity not find a metaphysics of full self-presence to the self? We clasp our hands over our ears, it is simply too loud.

II. Towards a Corrective: Deleuzean Becoming, Involution and Mutation

The model of the rhizome decenters both the subject and language. Three principles govern the rhizome, namely, connection, heterogeneity and multiplicity. The multiple, as substantive, ceases to have any relation to the one (unity), it has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, diversions and dimensions which are capable of increasing in number if the multiple is changing in nature, expanding its potentiality and hence, its range. The rhizome is a stream without beginning.7

Deleuze and Guattari offer an "ethology of assemblages"8 which propounds that behavior can only be understood when viewed as a component in a larger system (or assemblage). So the role of human agents redefined in behavioral-adaptive terms as "distributed cognitive engines" establishes the flow of reason across the brain and world.9 What this account does is deterritorialize the center for evaluating failures/successes and attributes it to "brain-body coalitions in ecologically realistic environments" instead of the brain-itself or the subjectivity of the organism, such as Kierkegaard's knight of faith. If we are to use the term at all, the 'subject' is a/centered. This marginalization of the organism is crucial for Deleuze and Guattari's conception of 'machinic-assemblages' which allude to the ecological framing of systems.

The abstract machine10, as a principle of becoming, bifurcates, so an assemblage involves two segments, content and expression, machinic assemblages "of bodies, actions and passions; an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another" are generated from the content side, collective assemblages "of acts and statements, incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies" from the expressive side (ATP: 88).

Given this, we may say that Deleuze and Guattari focus on lifting up its implications for becoming-i.e.-the pragmatics of human existence, of which is our concern here. Pragmatics, recall, is derived from the branch of linguistics that deals with the circumstances of language use, i.e. events and acts-language is investigated as an activity, as we saw with machinic assemblages.

So, for one Deleuze and Guattari displace any representationalist model of agency such as the augmented subjectivity of Kierkegaard's existential humanism we discerned above.11 Instead, agency becomes an emergent process rooted in a sort of biology and is inescapable from, as we have seen, the larger ecological context. The payoff, as we shall see, is that it opens up the possibility for multi-tiered embodiment as a characteristic of existence. Becoming fractures any theory of agency. First, we turn to Deleuze's model of difference and the intricate role that immanence plays in this scheme.

For Deleuze, difference has been covered over by the operation of negation central to any theory of identity [negative difference]. Deleuze ruptures the mirror-like reflection of the representationalist spectator and Kierkegaard's narcissistic 'believer', and reveals a subsurface vitality of difference. This finds, according to Deleuze and Guattari "that intensity remains implicated in itself and continues to envelop difference at the very moment when it is reflected in the extensity and the quality that it creates, which implicate it only secondarily" (ATP: 240). Consequently, the Deleuzean model of difference, redefined as a continuum of intensity, introduces12 what we may call an ontological (two)fold into Deleuze's conceptual apparatus, which engenders the important notion of the plan(e) of immanence. This allows Deleuze to differentiate an order of emergence [immanence, process] from an order of 'constituted functioning' [organization, product, the plane of the organism] without placing the two in opposition. Deleuze then, posits a division between two discrete orders in which the real may be grasped, Hansen describes the two as the "domain of quality and quantity" [where things are given external determination] and a subterraneous domain of intensity governed by relationality.

So, secondly, this transcendental principle of difference, e.g. intensity, destabilizes the representationalist paradigm of agency by merit of its new possibilities for rhizomatic connections across boundaries of all kinds.

There can be no static identity of the one, instead identity, when generated through becoming, is fleeting. Becoming consists of a tension between two modes of desire, viz., molarity [being, sameness] and the indeterminacy of supermolecularity [becoming, difference and hyperdifferentiation-which is to live dangerously]-that plots a vector of transmutation between two molar points. Molarity and Supermolecularity are different ways of responding to a constraint, in the molar sense, we actualize it in the body instead of counteractualizing13 it by removing the body from its normal habitat.

Clearly, in one way Kierkegaard appears to be concerned with counteractualizing molarity, the knight of faith deploys strategies of becoming-camouflage-which we applaud as living dangerously as schizophrenic through the paradoxical (and simultaneous) movement of self-abnegation and self-assertion. For Deleuze and Guattari "Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible, it is by nature imperceptible" (ATP: 280). Abraham is becoming-imperceptible, he walks among us, his minority status subverts the molar formations of the state apparatus-in camouflage, he inhabits a derelict space. Put differently, becoming seeks an escape velocity, a velocity so that it may propel itself through [Oedipal] constraints such as phallocentrism or molar personhood.14

In fact, Kierkegaard's deployment of love is best approached by way of the relation between the infinite and finite that helps to define a human being. The movement of the infinite, then, occurs through love. The leap into the infinite, which repeatedly discloses and re-discloses the finite, renders a coherent narrative in time. The leap into the stratum of faith, in order to function properly, has to be recast through a Deleuzean landscape of immanence. Such a necessity for unqualified immanence fractures the uncertainty of the future: possibility appears in the range of radical openness. Unlike the anxiety motivated cover-up of the basic structure of the self, the knight of faith's authentic overcoming is to be contrasted with the nihilistic counter movements of self-deception-the molar apparatus of the state. For the self deceiver, possibility and hence, becoming-other, is ceaselessly deferred to quell the anxiety of the uncertain future.

The knight of faith then, achieves subjectivity not through the paradoxical movement of simultaneous self-destruction and assertion, but rather through a movement of becoming. The immaterial is perceived through affects by recasting recollection through a speculum of love, which enables the believer to witness the infinite in the finite. Yet, this account of the knight of faith still reverts to the plane of 'constituted functioning', the ecological is ignored by Kierkegaard's deep subjectivity of production.

Deleuze and Guattari offer a definition of becoming, which is worth quoting, even if at undue length:

Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance. If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of symbiosis that bring into play being of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation. There is a block of becoming that snaps up the wasp and the orchid, but from which no wasp-orchid can ever descend. There is a block of becoming that takes hold of the cat and baboon, the alliance between which is effected by a C virus. There is a block of becoming which is effected by the materials synthesized in the leaves (rhizosphere) (ATP: 238)
Here, we see possibilities for the oblique movement across boundaries, becoming engenders molecular 'identity'. It makes no sense to talk about things in terms of stasis, everything is in motion, so we speak in terms of longitude, latitudes, speed, affects and change, the world appears through a child's eyes, everything is unique and new at every moment-becoming is directional, not intentional. So, thirdly, we can characterize becoming as having a neither/or logic, like the schizophrenic, who occupies a region of identity that encircles all of the elements in an assemblage, and unlike the narcissistic turned addict knight, we don't become wholly dependent on any one element.

In Deleuze and Guattari's cartographic philosophy latitude delegates the set of affects of the body, that is, a set of actions of which it is capable. Longitude designates "the particle aggregates belonging to a body in a given relation" (ATP: 256). Longitude and Latitude name two coordinates and are not a function of any sort of agency inhabited by a particular assemblage, rather, they are to be understood as an expression of the plane of immanence, in a particular plateau or mode. Hansen rightly denotes latitude and longitude as ethological coordinates which equip the molecular components of bodies free from molar production (i.e. the organism and knight). As becomings, affects are a set of incorporeal transformations, the bifurcations that move a body into different regions of what Deleuze and Guattari characterize as its phase-space, in other words, the body may enter new assemblages.

The goal is not to find a prototype of the body, but to create a new body at the ground, wholly immanent. The knight of faith merely leaps, instead, we investigate the coordinate of latitude to discern the bodies' range of affect, or capacity, we determine where it may go and what it may be able to do. In contradistinction to the extensive parts, i.e. the form of the longitude of the body, affects are virtual and intensive. Quite like the movements of the knight, the charted line of flight is primary: except here, differences are marked in light of the potential that we associate with body parts. This is what Deleuze and Guattari famously name a 'body without organs' (BwO)-a body "from the point of view of it potential dynamism".15

Becoming seeks the undomesticated body animated by the nuances of the shared environment. Instead of being discarded or displaced, rational thought and the qualified ego are split open into a space of invention and experimentation-for "On the plane of immanence experimentation replaces interpretation" (ATP: 284). As a form of thought, becoming is a counteractualization of molar or analytic or representational thought, it is molecular or non-figurative.

Early on in the 10th plateau Deleuze and Guattari announce that "becoming is involution, involution is creative [and not regressive like the knight of faith]" (ATP: 238). Becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself, to involve is to create a block of becoming that flows between designations. Becoming, in this sense, is the creation of a third term, a rhizomic bisecting between variant terms. The primacy of form is dissolved, the production of Kierkegaard's faith is displaced by the creative process of involution which "frees times and speeds" (267)-as a result, becoming supports and makes possible monstrous coupling, or put differently, "inter-kingdoms" (ATP: 241). Deleuze and Guattari's assertion that "the vampire does not filiate, it infects" is in many ways descriptive of what we have been discussing. Contagion, infestation and epidemic involves terms which are heterogeneous, such as Deleuze and Guattari's example of a truffle, which involves a tree, a fly and a pig-these combinations are not genetic, they are unnatural participations, they are monstrous couplings. This places emphasis on the determinative function of deterritorialization and a subsequent re-territorialization, the agency for code modification16 is shifted from the organism to the environment. Thus, any autonomy is now predicated on the larger ecological region.

We must not turn our backs on the high-intensity counterbalance of hyper-differentiation, of living dangerously, while Kierkegaard leaps into a single horizon of infinity, we would rather seek extra-genetic mechanisms of variation. We should be wary of Kierkegaardian love, like the old saying that the pet and his owner begin to look the same, we seek to avoid a regression to a narcissistic becoming-the-same, lest we have the situation offered in Brian Massumi's quip: "love and regression in a fur coat".17 We start our experimentation where correspondence ends and follow the logic of neither/or. The dialectic is a dead end.

Notes

1. For brevity's sake I have, for the most part, relied on the following texts:
Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, Volume 1, [CUP] trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, [ATP] trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

2. In contrast to the received view of Kierkegaard providing a non-representationalist account of truth, I believe that Kierkegaard remains committed to representational epistemology, which cannot survive in the post-Nietzchean landscape. Representationalism is the position that in perception and thought we receive sensible or intelligible forms. Such forms are representations of things, events in the world or qualities. We gain epistemological access to these forms through these representations. Thoughts are knowable, and thus made true, by situating oneself in some sort of extra-causal relation to things, events in the world or particularities.

3. See Nietzsche's Nachlass, trans. The Will to Power.

4. "Objectively the emphasis is on what is said; subjectively the emphasis is on how it is said" (CUP: 202).

5. The crucial passage of which this summary was derived is to be found in CUP, p199-200: "The existing person who chooses the objective way now enters upon all approximating deliberation intended to bring forth God objectively, which is not achieved in all eternity, because God is a subject and hence only for subjectivity in inwardness. The existing person comprehends the whole dialectical difficulty...he must resort to God at that very moment, because every moment in which he does not have God is wasted."

6. This has obvious parallels to Heidegger's critique of onto-theology and Nietzsche's assault on 'religion'. cf. Heidegger's essays "Phenomenology and Theology" and its appendix "The Problem of a Nonobjectifying Thinking and Speaking in Today's Theology" in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), pp39-62; also see Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

7. In such terminology, we may equate the rhizome with concepts or plateaus, Deleuze comments that plateau "isn't a metaphor, they're zones of continuous variation, or like watchtowers surveying their own particular areas and signaling to each other"(Negotiations, 142).

8. Cf. Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 1999), 154f.--for his discussion on the ethology of assemblages.

9. For Deleuze this means that "creating new circuits in art means creating them in the brain too" (Negotiations, 26).

10. See ATP: 223ff. The abstract machine itself bifurcates into an abstract machine of state apparatus or of mutation.

11 Pearson (Germinal, 89) states, "Deleuze seeks to undermine the idea of knowledge that is implied in the transcendental model of modern metaphysics, which, he argues, is a model and form of recognition (between self and world, or subject and object, and self and other). Construed in terms of a model or form of recognition, philosophy is unable to open itself up to that which exceeds its faculties and the norms it imposes on their operation (the aberrant, the anomalous, the fuzzy, the indiscernible, and so on)."

12. In an interesting article in Postmodern Culture (11.1) Mark Hansen also discerns a similar move. See "Becoming as Creative Involution?: Contextualizing Deleuze and Guattari's Biophilosophy".

13. Massumi's terminology. See Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

14. Massumi characterizes becoming as that which begins as a desire to escape bodily limitation, "an equilibrium seeking system of a crisis point where it suddenly perceives a deterministic constraint, becomes sensitive to it and is catapulted into a highly unstable supermolecular state enveloping a bifurcating future" (User's Guide, 95).

15. BwO "can be thought of as the constellation of part-objects governing a given body's tendencies in becoming, or its desire...The plane of consistency (full body) is the interaction between the imitative and nonlimative BwO's functioning in a society...Each BwO is a deterritorializtion of the plane of consistency (superabstracted as pre function; as grasped from the point of view of its potential dynamism-but from the necessary limited perspective of one of the bodies within it)" (Massumi, User's Guide, 184, also cf. ATP: 333f.).

16. "A code is inseparable from a process of decoding that is inherent to it.... There is no genetics without "genetic drift." The modern theory of mutations has clearly demonstrated that a code, which necessarily relates to a population, has an essential margin of decoding: not only does every code have supplements capable of free variation, but a single segment may be copied twice, the second copy left free for variation. In addition, fragments of code may be transferred from the cells of one species to those of another, Man and Mouse, Monkey and Cat, by viruses or through other procedures. This involves not translation between codes (viruses are not translators) but a singular phenomenon we call surplus value of code, or side-communication" (ATP: 53). See also Massumi, User's Guide, 51-52.

17. See Massumi, User's Guide; see also ATP: 240.

Jason Flato is a doctoral student in the Philosophy and Cultural Theory program at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. His writing has appeared in the Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory and the Journal for Religion and Film.

Copyright © 2003 Jason Flato. All rights reserved

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