Join the new world

This somewhat warped and only slightly off-color take-off on Deleuze's farewell obscuranto is devoted to all those stoned teenagers out there, in commemoration of the end of war on drugs in Canada. (Drugs won. Yay.)

















immanent [im-uh-nuhnt]
1) remaining within; indwelling; inherent.
2) Philosophy. (of a mental act) taking place within the mind of the subject and having no effect outside of it.






A transcendental field is distinguished from experience in that it doesn't refer to an object or belong to a subject. A pure stream of non-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a duration of consciousness without a self, in contrast to everything that makes up the world of subject and object, something wild and powerful beyond sensation.


Sensation is only a break within the flow of absolute consciousness. The transcendental field of consciousness is a passage from one sensation to the other as becoming, as increase or decrease in power, in a movement that neither begins nor ends. Consciousness is fact only when subject produces an object and vice-versa, both being outside the transcendental field and appearing rather as transcendents. Consciousness traverses the transcendental field at an infinite speed everywhere diffused and nothing is able to reveal it. It is expressed only when reflected on a subject that refers it to objects, and so the transcendental field cannot be defined by the consciousness that is coextensive with it but removed from revelation.



The transcendent is not the transcendental. The transcendental field would be a pure plane of immanence, eluding all transcendence of subject and object, were it not for consciousness.

Absolute immanence is in itself, not in something or to something; it depends neither on subject nor object. Substance and modes are in immanence. The transcendental is entirely de-natured and immanence distorted when subject and object fall outside the plane of immanence. Immanence is not related to Some Thing.

Pure immanence is a life. And nothing else. Not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence, complete power, complete bliss. The transcendental field is a life, not dependent on a Being or submitted to an Act. It is the absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers to a being but is ceaselessly posed in a life.




Immanence is a life.

A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death.

The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens, a life with whom everyone empathizes and which attains a sort of beatitude, no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things that made it good or bad. Such individuality fades away in favor of the singular life immanent to one who no longer has a name, though she can be mistaken for no other.

A singular essence, a life...











Life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects. This indefinite life does not itself have moments, close as they may be to one another, but only between-times, between-moments, an immensity of empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of immediate consciousness.

It is an in-between time that can engulf entire armies. The singularities and events that constitute a life coexist with the accident of the life that corresponds to it, but they are neither grouped nor divided the same way. They connect in manner entirely different from how individuals connect.

Very small children all resemble one another and have hardly any individuality, but they have singularities: a smile, a gesture, a funny face -- not subjective qualities. Through all their sufferings and weaknesses, small children are infused with an immanent life that is pure power and even bliss.

The indefinite is the mark of a determination by immanence, a transcendental determinability. One is always the index of a multiplicity: an event, a singularity, a life...

All transcendence is constituted solely in the flow of immanent consciousness that belongs to this plane. Transcendence is always a product of immanence.




A life contains only virtuals. It is made up of virtualities, events, singularities. Virtual is not something that lacks reality but something that is engaged in a process of actualization following the plane that gives it its particular reality. The immanent event is actualized in a state of things and of the lived that make it happen.

The plane of immanence is itself actualized in an object and a subject to which it attributes itself, yet the plane of immanence is itself virtual, so long as the events that populate it are virtualities.

The indefinite event lacks nothing. It suffices to put it in relation to its concomitants: a transcendental field, a plane of immanence, a life, singularities.

A wound is incarnated or actualized in a state of things, in life; but it is itself a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence that leads us into a life. Our wounds exist before us: not a transcendence of the wound as higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtuality always within a milieu.

There is a big difference between the virtuals that define the immanence of the transcendental field and the possible forms that actualize them and transform them into something transcendent.