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ACTUAL VIRTUAL - #07
ISSN 1752-5624
Deleuze’s Untimely
This paper studies the expression of Nietzsche’s Untimely within a Deleuzian philosophy of history. Immanence and the Outside form a relation throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s work that leads to their radical conception of the event, and in particular the historical event. As we see in What Is Philosophy?, in conjunction with Foucault’s Actual and Péguy’s Aternal, the Nietzschean Untimely provides a touchstone for Deleuze and Guattari’s explanation of creativity in the historical event: the unhistorical is located as both the force and the site from which the sedimentations of history emerge. But while Deleuze and Guattari share in Nietzsche’s attempt to facilitate creations counter to our historical present, it cannot be said that they explicitly mirror (or indeed remain entirely faithful to) Nietzsche’s analysis of history, its terms, and its effects in society. By tracing the various uses of the Untimely throughout Deleuze’s corpus, a differential ‘becoming/history’ materialises that simultaneously enhances aspects of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the untimely whilst conflating others.
This conflation can be located on both sides of the differential: while the singular attributes that form Nietzsche’s Untimely topology – the ahistorical and the suprahistorical – are transformed into synonyms of ‘becoming’, ‘history’ also undergoes a facile conflation that effectively attaches to it all the forms of historicism that Nietzsche was opposed to. The result of this coalescence is the replacement of Nietzsche’s project of developing a history for the future with a Deleuzian philosophy of the future, and consequently a hostility towards the figure of history. Once the Untimely has been removed from a history for life and amalgamated in a philosophy of becoming, it is little wonder that a Deleuzian ‘philosophy of history’ appears to be an oxymoron. Attention to Deleuze’s particular appropriation of Nietzsche’s Untimely, however, can show us that the creative elements of Nietzsche’s historical project still persists in Deleuze, albeit under the guise of an immanent nomadology that incorporates both the virtual and actual manifestations of an historical event
Craig Lundy
Craig Lundy is studying a PhD in Philosophy (UNSW). His Thesis Topic is Deleuze and History. Through an investigation of Deleuzian concepts such as virtual/actual events, nomadology, deterritorialisation and machinic assemblages, this thesis questions what use Deleuze has for the Philosophy of History. Drawing from his work on Nietzsche and Bergson, Deleuze’s subsequent ideas on time (from aion/chronos to dead time and stratigraphic time) are evaluated with respect to the projects of nomadology and the universal history of capitalism.
Deleuze’s Untimely
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