pre-individual singularities?

i found this useful in relation to our discussion of singularity vs. particular, from Francois Zourabichvili’s book La vocabulaire de Deleuze. Paris: Ellipses, 2003. Original Translation by Taylor Adkins 11/03/07.

Pre-individual Singularities

* We cannot accept the alternative which thoroughly compromises psychology, cosmology, and theology: either singularities already comprised in individuals and persons, or the undifferentiated abyss. Only when the world, teeming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental (LS 103).

** The elaboration of the concept of singularity proceeds from a radicalization of the critical or transcendental interrogation: the individual is not primary in the order of sense, it must be engendered in thought (problematic of individuation); sense is the space of nomadic distribution, it does not exist in the original division of significations (problematic of the production of sense). In effect, although it seems at first glance that ultimate reality is as much language and representation in general, the individual supposes the staging of a convergence of a certain number of singularities, determining a condition of closure under which is defined an identity: that certain predicates are retained implies that others are excluded. In the conditions of representation, the singularities are thus directly predicates, attributable to subjects. But sense is by itself indifferent to predication (“to green” is an event as such, before becoming the possible property of a thing, “being green”); by consequence it communicates by law with every other event, independently of the rule of convergence that appropriates it to an eventual subject. The plane where sense is produced is thus populated with ‘nomadic’ singularities, simultaneously non-attributable and non-hierarchical, and constitutive of pure events (LS, 65-67, 130, 136). These singularities have between them relations of divergence or disjunction, certainly not of convergence since this implies already the principle of exclusion which controls individuality: they only communicate through their difference or their distance, and the free play of sense and its production lies precisely in the course of these multiple distances, or “disjunctive syntheses” (LS, 201-204). The individuals who we are, deriving from this nomadic field of individuation which knows only couplings and disparities, the perfectly impersonal and unconscious transcendental field, do not renew this play of sense without making the test of the mobility of their frontiers (DR., 327,331). On this level, each thing is no longer itself but a singularity which “opens predicates ad infinitum through which it passes, at the same time as it loses its center, i.e. its identity as concept and as self” (LS, 204,344-345).

*** Pre-individual singularities are thus always relative to a multiplicity. We say however that Deleuze hesitates between two possible treatments. Sometimes singularities designate intensive “dimensions” of a multiplicity (LS, 345; AOE, 369 n 28, 381), and by this title should be named “intensities,” “affects,” or even “haecceities”; their repetition corresponds then to the affective map of an agency (MP 248, CC 81), or moreover to the continuous modulation of a material (MP 457-58, 505-509). At other times they are distributed at the level of each dimension, and are redistributed from one dimension to another: such are the remarkable or “brilliant points” of each degree of the Bergsonian cone of memory (B 58, 103-104), “points on the dice” of each throw of nomadic distribution (DR., 228-230; LS 69), etc. It is not certain however that these two treatments do not converge. It will be noticed that Deleuze passes easily from a singularity to many singularities, as if any singularity were already many (LS 67, 345): in fact the singularities that compose a multiplicity “penetrate the ones in the others through an infinity of degrees”, each dimension being like a point of view on all the others, which distributes them all on its level. Such is the law of “sense as pre-individual singularity, intensity which returns to itself through all the others” (LS 347—logic of the disjunctive synthesis). This “complication”, which is only by law, requires to be effectuated: but then there is only redistribution, the creative dice throw as if the “resumption of the singularities the ones in the others” is exerted under the condition of a meeting of distinct “problems” (DR. 259) or heterogeneous series (LS 68). From there a theory of apprenticeship (DR. 32,248), and of what it means “to have an Idea” (DR. 236-258—an extremely difficult text but one whose comprehension is decisive: compare with F (90-97): one is well on the way to what A Thousand Plateaus will explore under the name of “multiplicity of multiplicities” (theory of “becomings”).