A brief Note on [In]Dividuation: Levi Bryant in the Folds (Falling in Love with Deleuze All Over Again)

Levi Bryant has presented an interesting turn on Deleuze's '[in]dividuation' in his Larval Subjects piece, "Of Folds and Vortices."


Though Bryant's experience of writing locates dividuation further downstream from where I located it in the liminal zone between the Real and the Imaginary, he describes something similar:




Where writing is a verb, the unfolding of a thought that she has not yet thought, the written is the dead letter, fallen into matter and now present in the world.  She has been dividuated by her writing.  The author is always two.  She is the writing, but also the written that persists after her.  She is responsible for and before the written, yet also not it.  She is responsible for what she has written, for she inscribed those things and made them actual in the world.






So if dividuation refers to the blurring within the transformation between registers, then the transformation or translation, neither fully actualized, deferred always in the hazy oscillations of their liminality, point to the dyadic essence of the phenomenological moment: the laterality inscribed by givenness and the recipient that saturates relationality. I agree with Bryant that dyadism is in no way a dualism. Laterality, as I have described it recently, has nothing to do with dualism.


These observations might come to bear on the blurring of horizons that have earned Marion much critique. If Marion's thought of the plasticity of horizons fits into, for example, Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible, it would be in a 'fold,' a Cusanian wrinkle in reality. Marion, after all, is no stranger to Deleuze. And I wonder, how great a distance there really is between Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (October, 59, Winter, 1992) and Marion's flirtation with Agamben in Negative Certainties.