A non-concept or the Critique of the self

"All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human

existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which

space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be

made." — Michel Foucault1

In regular everyday discourse, we talk about "finding a true self," "manifesting a

true me," or even losing oneself for a minute in the affect of emotions or the routine of

everyday life. There is a presupposition that each has an idea of what he/she is, has been,

and would like to be—thus a concept of oneself is created. Philosophical conceptions of

what one is have changed quite a lot throughout the history. Multiple formalist,

teleological, causal, pragmatist, instrumentalist, and structuralist explanations have been

proposed, and a number of paradise shifts have happened—significant is the transition

from a genus-species model of early philosophers (i.e. "rational animal") to a human-

unique qualitative determination (Descartes' "I Think")2 to structuralist-behaviorist

approaches starting with Kant's transcendental categories and continuing through Marx,

Freud, behaviorism, etc that emphasize how nature or outside events shape our notion of

the self.

I started out this project planning to describe an ontology of what we call a self. I

researched contemporary theories about it, primarily in the analytic tradition, and was on

my way to constructing a system that would encompass the four ways we can think about

the self (metaphysical, conscious, self-as-object of experience, and self-as-subject of

experience)—the locus of which should have been the conscious/personal self existing

ontologically as a concept/construction. It was to be defined as a mental integration (a

unit) of all the possible instances/states of the metaphysical self in the past, present, and

future; as an open-ended concept that includes all of one's thoughts, dreams, actions,

goals, values, etc.

But then my years-long depression intensified, and following losses my

grandmother and great-grandmother to Covid-19, a full existential and philosophical

crisis subsumed. ;. It led me to question the presupposition—not in its actuality, but in its

necessity. Is it an inherent/pure aspect of the way our mind works, or merely a historical

(nevertheless totalizing) contingency that we think about ourselves this way—a historical

a priori.3 Because isn't a statement "I am losing myself" haunted by an internal

contradiction—how can one lose something (himself/herself) that constitutes their

existence-essence (or in Heideggerian, their onto-ontological reality) without losing life

itself? I realized this conceptual self is a virtual that can only actualize itself as an Other

in our thoughts—be it an idealized Other or a pessimist one, depending on one's mental

state.4 But why do we then value this concept over our actuality—why we value this

absent Other over our actual present?

One of the main objects of twentieth-century philosophy, particularly its

Continental branch, was the issue of being and identity. Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre,

structuralists, psychoanalysts, and many others tried to describe what being is and how it

exists—be it an inanimate being or a human being—and how to postulate its identity

without falling into the traps of representationalism given the category application gap

within Kant's critical project. The best solution to the issue was formulated by French

thinker Gilles Deleuze who turn the problem upside down and proposes a theory of

transcendental empiricism according to which what we actually experience the world not

through the metaphysical primacy of identities, but rather the difference-in-itself

(differential dx) that is being repeated with variations in intensities. The concepts/Ideas

constructed are thus not subject to representationalism as virtual (ideal but still real)

multiplicities that can change and be applied/actualized in different plateaus/planes.

The same pedagogical status of the concept can be found everywhere: a

multiplicity, an absolute surface or volume, self-referents, made up of a

certain number of inseparable intensive variations according to an order

of neighborhood, and traversed by a point in a state of survey. The

concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to

come. Concepts in this sense belong to philosophy by right, because it is

philosophy that creates them and never stops creating them. The concept

is obviously knowledge—but knowledge of itself, and what it knows is

the pure event, which must not be confused with the state of affairs in

which it is embodied. The task of philosophy when it creates concepts,

entities, is always to extract an event from things and beings, to set up the

new event from things and beings, always to give them a new event:

space, time, matter, thought, the possible as events.5

Nevertheless, while a virtual fragmented whole that "shapes and reshapes the

event in its own way"6 is useful in explaining our experience of phenomena it still in

application to ourselves would present itself as an Other. It's reasonable to ask why that

would be a problem given the nature of the concept. The issue is that no signifier, even a

fragmentary one, can ever truthfully denote such what we experience about ourselves—

our metaphorical singularity. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari touched this problem

when in A Thousand Plateaus they introduced the idea of

 an abstract machine of faciality (visagéité), which produces [faces] at the

same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black

hole. Thus the black hole/white wall system is, to begin with, not a face

but an abstract machine that produces faces according to the changeable

combinations of its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to

resemble what it produces, or will produce.7

Therefore, any concept of the self would necessarily reduce and imprison our

inherent singularity with all the differences. Important side note, by singularities I do not

mean points on the coordinate axis which can produce a shape when combined (D&G's

singularities), rather I think of the gravitational singularities that in addition to being

impossible to fully define also break the spacetime itself (rather than merely fold it) and

may even introduce a new dimension. Even if I produce a Venn diagram with thousands,

millions of circles in it, there is still no way it won't postulate an Other to me whenever I

would try to use it to explain myself. In his insightful essay on the postmodern self

Leonard Lawlor asks a question “can there be a people that does not do violence to

singularities?”8 The same question must be extended further—can there be a concept of a

self that doesn’t do violence to our singularity?

That problematic is not merely a theoretical issue for an individual to resolve, it

has direct ethical and political consequences. As Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida,

Lyotard, and others have shown the influence of the totalizing discourse formations into

which we are born shapes the concepts we may construct and the thoughts and discourses

we may have. In the current late-stage of capitalism with its incessant focus on the

efficacy and pervasiveness of production and consumption human objectification and

alienation are already ever prevalent—pressuring one into one-dimensionality of a

production/consumption machine. And when objectification turns into self-objectification

capitalist realism appears inescapable as one develops a very pervert case of a Stockholm

syndrome toward a socioeconomic regime that dehumanizes one. We start to purposefully

limit our realm of Being ourselves and imprison our singularity. There is no surprise then

that some thinkers like Mark Fisher postulate that depression is now a new normality, a

new historical a priori for our time.

D&G made the first step by denying the existence of the id. But that was not

enough. In the end their explanations still circled back to psychoanalysis and Marxism—

the two true cultural conditions of capitalism. In their explanation the objectivization of a

subject still persisted—now just through its division into desiring machines etc. Camus’s

absurdism tries to explain the clash between human totalizing tendencies and inherent

world chaos, but the even bigger chaos is in some sense the human being itself. And the

totalizing tendencies, exacerbated by what Lyotard called economical genre of existence

in capitalism, clash even more with the chaotic nature of whatever we are. The self

narrative one builds—the self-concepts, psychoanalysis, etc—all became the historical a

priori of our time, the rules of our discursive formations. The surge of the popularity of

mindfulness is a vivid example of our tendency to objectify ourselves—we conceptually

divide ourselves into different "selves," one of which is more True than others and to

which we should return. Work-family conflict, mid-life crisis, existential crisis, suicidal

thoughts—all this and much more is a result of our tendency to not merely to compare

ourselves with this concept and judge ourselves based on it but also to identify ourselves

with this constructed Other. Thus, even though theories like psychoanalysis may

distinguish something true about our condition in the modern world, are a part and parcel

of it as they commit the same fallacy. That’s why both psychoanalysis and Marxism lost
the emancipatory potential Žižek talks about in his In Defense of Lost Causes, they cannot

fully emancipate from themselves—they are now not merely a critique of the existing

society, they are its constitutive elements. Deleuze and Guattari were right when they said

that psychoanalysis “translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything into

phantasy, it retains phantasy.”9

Following Kant, we must start with a critical project: a project that delimits what

can be said about the self. and here again following Kant, we can divide the entire project

into a pure and practical aspects. But in addition to the possible dialectical illusions, it’s

important to recognize the historical illusions.

Deleuze again is the philosopher who provided the most pristine event horizon for

this singularity when near the end of his life he focused on the notion of immanence and

wrote that “we will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing more.”10 The

choice of words is critical here—if he were to write “being” instead of “life” he would

have already encircled the depths of a singularity thus effectively desingularizing it. As

the preeminent philosopher of difference, he realized that any determination (as Being or

One, or Whole) always comes secondary. This essay on immanence some scholars

consider to be a moving away from various positions of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia

project developed together with Guattari, and for a good reason. When describing

Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend as a literary example of this immanence he writes

The life of the individual has given way to an impersonal and yet singular

life, which foregrounds a pure event that has been liberated from the

accidents of internal and external life, that is, from subjectivity and the

objectivity of what comes to pass.11

 It’s clearly discernible that this immanence is totally non-narrational. There is

nothing totalizing about it except the immanence itself. All other attempts at formulations

of the essential nature of our life had there conceptual narrative limitations embedded into

them as ghosts that haunt and shape the real: “I think therefore I am,” “Being-in-the-

world"/Dasein, etc—thus avoiding the singularity. If we were to try to give it a linguistic

signifier it would be with an avalent verb “be” without any other qualifications added

(such verbs dont exist in English but other languages such as Russian or Mandarin

Chinese they can be found).

The singularities or the events which constitute a life coexist with the

accidents of the life that corresponds to it, but they are not arranged and

distributed in the same way. They relate to one another in a completely

different way than individuals do. It even seems that a singular life can do

without any individuality at all, even without any of the concomitants that

individualize it. For example, infants all resemble one another and have

hardly any individuality; but they do have singularities—a smile, a

gesture, a grimace—such events are not subjective traits. Infants are

traversed by an immanent life which is pure power, and even beatitude

during moments of weakness and suffering. The indefinites of a life lose

their indetermination to the extent that they occupy a plane of

immanence, or what amounts to the same thing, to the extent that they

constitute the elements of a transcendental field (individual life, however,

remains inseparable from empirical determinations).12

 But this immanent project is often sidetracked in Deleuze’s ouevre by his attempt

to reintroduce desire as an essential part of human life—thus immediately taking a 2D

photo of a person with a camera of economic relations. Example of that is the idea of a

Body without Organs—the forever-attaining limit of possibilities of our existence, “what

remains when you take everything away.”13 This BwO is described as “the field of

immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a

process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that

hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it.”14 Note that in "Immanence" there isn’t any

mention of a BwO. I think it is because later Deleuze understood that BwO is a

transcendental field, one of many and one that is specific to an empirical dimension of

desire—but “transcendence is always a product of immanence.”15

“A transcendent can always be invoked which falls outside the plane of

immanence, or which attributes the plane to itself. Nevertheless, all transcendence is

constituted solely in the stream of immanent consciousness proper to the plane.”16 BwO,

a Nomad, a schizophrenic and other concepts, personae, and planes are merely outside

virtuals, constructed and introduced into immanence, that when connected with a

transcendent idea try to attribute it the immanence to themselves.

BwO is a virtual concept that allows for the expression of the real experience—

but it is immanent not the the pure immanence/singularity but to the historical discursive

plane on which it is postulated. In other words, BwO is then just a part of the “image

though gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s

bearings in thought.”17 Thus in postulating the mistake of ever saying the id—

“everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones”18 (AO 1)—Deleuze and

Guattari may have failed their own supreme act of philosophy and constructed a plane of
immanence (in its WP formulation) that hands itself over to the transcendent of desire. In

a sense, BwO, just as a rhizome in ATP, is an attempt at a pure concept of the self devoid

of any individuality—but as a concept it must still have its borders defined by the

historical plane of consistency/discourse formation on which it exists. That is not to say

that it is instrumentally useless—no, absolutely not. But an instrumentality cannot be a

reason for a self-identity in a concept. A life is devoid of such a border for itself as it is

fully immanent to itself and in itself. it is not only the fact that we cannot see past the

event horizon of a black hole, but also the singularity itself can never see outside of the

event horizon as it exists out of spacetime—it is immanent. If we could imagine ourselves

being a parabola y=1/x: we would perceive nothing, including ourselves until the moment

a transcendental imposition of x!=0 would happen. At the instance of x=0 there would be

just "be"—non defined, nonsymbolized microcosm that spreads over the entire domain of

the function itself, but on top of which in certain conditions a transcendental coordinate

axis may impose a graph (BwO, rhizome, etc.—D&G's maps).

This is the reason why even their replacement of the idea of desiring-machines

with a concept of assemblage in ATP remains a two dimensional map as no flat surface

(plateau) on which connections of assemblages can be inscribed can even represent

singularity. These issues stem from Deleuze and Guattari's general pragmatist approach to

philosophy and philosophical books, best summarized in this discussion on ways to read a

book:

we consider a book as a small a-signifying machine; the only problem is

"Does it work and how does it work? How does it work for you?" If it

doesn't function, if nothing happens, take another book. This other way of
 reading is based on intensities: something happens or doesn't happen.

There is nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It

can be compared to an electrical connection.19

While being immensely instrumental in practice of dealing with objects and thus

central to conceptual thinking—which is incidentally why they say the object of

philosophy is "to create concepts that are always new,"20 along with new planes and

conceptual personae—this attitude is impotent when dealing with the life itself. While

D&G claim that concept as a creation is "always a singularity"21, it is not a pure

singularity as it is "a fragmentary whole."22 The absence of a clear theoretical division

between pure and secondary singularities, planes, and events is in my opinion a constant

missing feature of their thought which allowed it to be reabsorbed and assimilated by the

prevailing societal structures.23 In the essay on "Immanence," he says that "the plane of

immanence is itself virtual, in as much as the events that populate it are virtualities."24

That much is true—but pure immanence is not subject to the virtual/actual couple as it is

not merely "real" that is being actualized—it is the real, it encompasses both the virtual

and the actual at the same time. Hence, its purity—it is not immanent to a certain

constructed milieu, but it is immanent to itself and itself only. Applying the notion of

virtuality to life actually be creating a "transcendent which can contain even immanence."
25

Deleuze in multiple works talks a lot about the pre-individual singularities

different and repeating with various intensities—multiplicities out of which we are built

and which individuate us—, but what he sometimes omitted mentioning explicitly is the

underlying immanent singularity beneath all them. It is not only that death "is inscribed in

the I and the self, like the cancellation of difference in a system of explication, or the
degradation which compensated for the process of differentiation,"26 but a life is an

immanent condition of the multiplicities of difference and of the planes of immanence on

which only these multiplicities can appear and function. Even death as an event-

singularity is possible only on given a life.

Therefore, while D&G's transcendental empiricism intended to fulfill the

immanent ambitions of Kant's critique, it itself wasn't radical enough in its pursuit. While

philosophy is a constructivism27, the conditions of the construction (life as pure

immanence with difference and repetition as its only inherent characteristics) must be

considered prior to the process itself (creation of concepts and laying out of a plane in

D&G terms). If in Deleuze, "the principle of “difference-in-itself” is made to function as

the genetic element of real experience, from which the relations of identity, analogy,

resemblance, opposition, contradiction, negation, and so forth are derived as secondary

effects," we need to assert a genetic element of the principle of difference. Immanent

principles are still immanent to a pure plane of immanence, and not just to themselves.

What does this mean in terms of a question I posed in the beginning? I must then

conclude that if we take philosophy to be a discipline of creating concepts, the ontology

of the ourselves is aphilosophical—it is a condition for philosophy and not an object to it.

No ontological concept of the pure singularity that does not do violence to it can be

created. Any concept by the objectifying totalizing nature of the process of its creation

will result in the reduction of a "black hole" of a self to merely its event horizon from a

certain angle. This does not mean however that practically such snapshots are irrelevant

—on the other hand they may be highly instrumental. But they cannot be a foundation of

one’s sense of identity. Merely a limited decision to act/think/behave in a specific manner

within specific constraints (planes, formations) for a limited duration of time—let’s a pure
nomadology that constantly territorializes and deterritorializes itself for limited spans of

time, without ever allowing itself to merge with the territory and its historical a priori—

without ever becoming one-dimensional.

I think that this theory of the self has a unbounded radical potential as the only

theory which humanizes and “dehumanizes” us at the same time—it is centered around

everyone’s inherent value (the immanence of life) and strives to deobjectify every person

both in his interpersonal and social relations while simultaneously freeing us from the

constraints of a historical conception of what a human being can and might be that exists

at the current time. Capitalist realism absorbed many aspects of human life into itself,

including anti-capitalist critiques such as psychoanalysis and Marxism, to the point that it

feels that it “seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.” (Fisher CR). But this

seeming transcendental condition is not an immanent one, rather a historical one.

Therefore, as long as pure immanence is retained and not fully handed over to the

transcendental, the possibility for a new Event still exists as the self remains "a spur to

thinking."28
 Notes

1. Foucault, "Truth, Power, Self: An Interview," Technologies of the Self, p. 11.

2. A determination which, as Deleuze brilliantly describes in Difference and Repetition,

"must equal, or be of the same power as, the determinable."

3. Defined by Michel Foucault as "not a condition of validity for judgments, but a

condition of reality of statements." Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 127.

4. See instances of the depressive realism as an example.

5. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 32-33.

6. Ibid., 34.

7. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 168.

8. Lawlor, "The Postmodern Self: An Essay on Anachronism and Powerlessness," The

Oxford Handbook of the Self, 699.

9. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 151.

10. Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life," Two Regimes of Madness, 389.

11. Ibid., 390.

12. Ibid., 391-392.

13. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 151.

14. Ibid., 154.

15. Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life," Two Regimes of Madness, 392.

16. Ibid.

17. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 37.

18. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1.

19. Deleuze, "I Have Nothing to Admit," Anti-Oedipus: From Psychoanalysis to

Schizopolitics, 114.

20. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 5

21. Ibid., 7.

22. Ibid., 16.

23. A pertinent example is given in Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes, p. 204-205.

24. Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life," Two Regimes of Madness, 392.

25. ibid.

26. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 259.

27. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 35.

28. Lawlor, "The Postmodern Self: An Essay on Anachronism and Powerlessness," The

Oxford Handbook of the Self, 712.