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Kleinherenbrink ClosedVesselsSigns 2016
Kleinherenbrink ClosedVesselsSigns 2016
Chapter Title: Closed Vessels and Signs: Jealousy as a Passion for Reality
Chapter Author(s): Arjen Kleinherenbrink
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and the Passions
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3
Arjen Kleinherenbrink
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deleuze and the passions
Material signs
2 Ibid., 6.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 29.
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jealousy as a passion for reality
5 Ibid., 32.
6 Ibid., 101.
7 Ibid., 27, 29.
8 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann’s Way, trans.
Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: The
Modern Library, 1992), 502–3.
9 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 7.
61
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deleuze and the passions
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 122.
12 Ibid., 9.
13 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 55.
62
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jealousy as a passion for reality
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deleuze and the passions
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jealousy as a passion for reality
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deleuze and the passions
23 Ibid., 31.
24 Ibid., 11.
25 Ibid., 49.
66
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jealousy as a passion for reality
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deleuze and the passions
death, the claimant and the girl only have each other accord-
ing to their love. Any qualitative experience is thus common to
two things: a “present” of the object at hand and a “past” of that
in which it appears.28 In Proust and Signs Deleuze describes the
third thing in terms of “rising up.” In The Logic of Sense, it is the
paradoxical entity which “runs through” any two series. In Anti-
Oedipus, it is the body without organs which ‘falls back onto’
production wherever two machinic entities establish a connec-
tion. No pure appearance is possible, which is why signs of love
“anticipate in some sense their alteration and their annihilation”
and “love unceasingly prepares its own disappearance [and] acts
out its dissolution.”29
What keeps the jealous lover from grasping the belov-
ed in her unique essence? The previous three signs are “too
material.”30 “Material” does not mean “made of physical stuff,”
but “in something else”: “[A]ll the signs we meet in life are still
material signs, and their meaning, because it is always in some-
thing else, is not altogether spiritual.”31 The three material signs
always concern the experience of something in terms of what it
is not. This is to say they are relational. Worldly signs relate enti-
ties to general concepts and generic qualities which can always
be the same as or like those of other entities. Signs of love relate
the excessive powers or singularities of an entity to their transla-
tion into sensible experience: “[they] are inseparable from the
weight of a face, from the texture of a skin, from the width and
color of a cheek.”32 Finally, sensuous signs are inextricably mixed
with the third thing, the ground or circumstance in and accord-
ing to which an entity is experienced. Nevertheless, even though
progressing through the first three signs teaches him a great deal
about reality, the jealous lover who keeps failing to grasp the
beloved’s essence considers them waste of time. In each case, her
essence was “no longer master of its own incarnation, of its own
28 Ibid., 59.
29 Ibid., 19.
30 Ibid., 58.
31 Ibid., 41, emphasis added.
32 Ibid., 85.
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jealousy as a passion for reality
Immaterial signs
33 Ibid., 64.
34 Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 532.
35 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 13. “Hieroglyphs” is a synonym for “signs”
throughout the book. “Only material objects” paraphrases “[…] they
regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an unclouded vision
could not fail to discern […]” (Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 207).
36 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 9.
37 Ibid., 79.
69
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deleuze and the passions
38 Ibid., 13.
39 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tom-
linson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),
164.
40 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 40.
41 Ibid., 41.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
70
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jealousy as a passion for reality
44 Ibid., 89.
45 Ibid., 97.
46 Ibid., 109.
47 Ibid., 47, 100.
48 Each monad must have real qualities, otherwise they would not be dis-
tinct. See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “The Principles of Philosophy, or,
The Monadology,” in Philosophical Essays, trans. and eds. Roger Ariew and
Daniel Garber (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1989), §8, 213–24.
49 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 161.
71
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jealousy as a passion for reality
It is only on the level of art that the essences are revealed. But
once they are manifested in the work of art […], we learn
that they already incarnated, that they were already there in
all these kinds of signs […].55
Schizoid universe
The jealous lover does not find a solution, but a reason. He learns
why it is impossible to truly possess the beloved. The beloved,
like each entity, is the immaterial unity of a closed vessel wedded
to a malleable Idea, only appearing in relation by being trans-
lated or transmuted, by being co-constituted by the essences of
other entities. Essences can only be thought, never made pre-
sent: “in the case of the signs of art, pure thought as the faculty
of essences becomes the interpreter.”56 Or put differently: “The
intelligence dreams of objective content, of explicit objective
significations that it is able, of its own accord, to discover or to
receive or to communicate.”57 Note that this is not ontotheology.
The jealous lover knows that entities are sealed vessels wedded
to shifting desire, but precisely because such essences cannot ap-
54 Ibid., 47.
55 Ibid., 38.
56 Ibid., 86.
57 Ibid., 29, cf. “only intelligence extracts truth” (ibid., 23).
73
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deleuze and the passions
58 Ibid., 42.
59 Ibid., 139.
60 Ibid., 175.
61 Ibid., 92.
62 Ibid., 111.
63 Ibid., 112.
64 Ibid., 124.
74
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jealousy as a passion for reality
65 Ibid., 117.
66 Ibid., 114.
67 Ibid., 117.
68 Ibid., 119.
69 Ibid., 140.
70 Ibid., 175.
71 Ibid., 167.
72 Ibid., 123.
75
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deleuze and the passions
totalities do not exist and “this is what the closed vessels signify:
there is no totality except a statistical one that lacks any pro-
found meaning.”73 Nothing is ever locked in place, everything
in any relation can in principle escape and deterritorialize: there
are only “aberrant communications between the noncommuni-
cating vessels, transversal unities between the boxes that resist
any totalization […].”74
The world thus discovered revolves around “force.”75 Every-
thing, ranging from simple perception, to forging an amorous
relation, to keeping one’s parts in place, is a matter of struggle
between parts that have no natural place, no reason as such to be
anywhere as anything. This is the necessary consequence of the
“astonishing pluralism” Deleuze finds in Proust.76 If nothing has
a natural place, if nothing can be related to as such, then relating
to anything at all requires work, force, effort, translation, deceit,
maintenance, strategy, and luck. Moreover, learning becomes
the highest task:
73 Ibid., 125–26.
74 Ibid., 143.
75 Ibid., 152.
76 Ibid., 4.
77 Ibid.
76
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jealousy as a passion for reality
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