Mehdi Parsakhanqah

Building on Descartes’ Treatise on Man (L’Homme, 1662), Canguilhem introduces the concept of living machines. By integrating this idea with his view of life as lacking inherent vitality, as pathological and monstrous, we derive the notion of the “monstrous machine” to describe the extraordinary products of nature. This is based on Canguilhem’s application of the concept of indeterminacy, derived from the life sciences, to the physico-chemical sciences, leading to conclusions about the notion of natural undetermined or monstrous machines. He proposes the convertibility of life and technics, exploring the essence of technology within the ethnological development of man as a component of life’s technical evolution. Therefore, Canguilhem’s deconstruction of the organism in “Machine and Organism” results in a machinization of the organism, based on its multifunctionality in response to the diversity of milieu-systems and the differentiation of value-systems.

Catherine Malabou’s philosophical work draws a parallel between the brain’s plasticity and the structure of social and political life. She investigates the ethical and political implications of the epigenetic fact that the criteria for formation only emerge after the process of formation. In other words, now that we know our brain has no fixed structure governing our decisions, how should we navigate our social lives? In a transitional phase of her work, she also explores a parallel between the human brain and natural history, drawing on the work of historians like Daniel Smail and Dipesh Chakrabarty. This chapter aims to examine this transitional phase of Malabou’s work, exploring how the issues addressed during this period might shift her socio-political thought toward an ontological framework. In other words, our focus is on how the epigenetic nature of the human brain can introduce the concept of natural history as a plastic brain.

The works of George Canguilhem and Gilbert Simondon are among the most significant contributions to understanding the relationship between life and the development of technology. In this chapter, we focus on Simondon’s work, arguing that the philosophical elaboration of this problem is found not only in his first monograph, The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Méot, 1958), but also in Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (1964 and 1989). We argue that the concept of the “transindividual” signifies the process through which life gives rise to technology. Through a generalized notion of the network and the related concept of information, echoed in Individuation through the idea of the “transindividual”, Simondon addresses the genesis of the technical object. In his view, the technical object is not merely an artifact or tool, but rather a machine.

There has been a growing trend in various fields of contemporary philosophy, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and other areas of the human sciences that involves replacing classical concepts such as the object, the individual, the mind, the signifier, and others, with that of the machine or other related concepts, such as the network or the artificial brain. The evolution of the natural sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has incited modifications in the machine concept. Machines have evolved from being solely man-made technical instruments to now being seen as a philosophical tool, providing a fresh perspective on how we view the world. Now, machines not only surround us but have become infectious monsters that transform everything, including nature, into machines. As a result, the machine has become the prevailing concept of our time and requires a new ontology.

The most direct and comprehensive explanation of machinic ontology can be found in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze and Guattari. In these volumes, they boldly assert that everything is a machine, and that every machine can be transformed into a war machine. Our fifth chapter primarily examines the concepts of the abstract machine and the war machine in relation to the intersection of desiring-production and social production. Deleuze and Guattari characterize human bodies and societies as schizophrenic machines composed of flows of unconscious desire. The interchangeability of desiring-production and social production forms the foundation of a machinic ontology, where both the living body and society operate according to the same logic. In these volumes, machines are defined beyond the dualism of mechanism and vitalism, endowed with a kind of non-vitalist molecular life that enables them to operate at any level or scale of reality.

Two modes of thought can be distinguished, a poetical thought that has its eyes to the future, and a conservative, immunist or mechanistic thought which builds its road on the ground of past sediments. The defining characteristic of the first mode is its monstrosity. A future that is not monstrous is not a future, but merely a reflection of the past. These two modes of thought can be exemplified in terms of two functions of the brain, namely dreaming and remembering; that which liberates and that which binds. The social machine must be considered like a collective brain that does not operate only as a collective memory but rather as a collective dreaming-machine. It is only in this condition that history opens a place for revolution, as Marx writes, “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future”.

In this chapter, we examine Foucault’s concept of “true life” in relation to his idea of biopolitics, ultimately assessing how machinic ontology might reshape our ethical and political existence. Our primary objective is to transition from Canguilhem’s concept of the machinization of life to the idea of biopolitics, in which the social machine operates through modes of life and aesthetics of existence. Thus, our examination of Foucault will address the ethical issue of self-governance as the foundation for politics rooted in dominance and obedience, aiming to replace it with an ethics-politics grounded in social resistance. In the final section of the chapter, we will concentrate on Foucault’s concept of dispositif and Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of it in his work “What is Apparatus?” We conclude that Foucault’s notion of dispositive, and Agamben’s reading of it, indicate an attempt to search for an account of sociality which is not structural and representational.

This book considers the becoming-concept of the machine-metaphor. It explores the intersections between this becoming and the development of the concepts of life, organism, and technics. It seeks to introduce universal machinism as a metaphysical foundation with specific ethical and political implications. A machinic ontology proposes that the whole has no inside, the body has no head, a society needs no leader, and the brain has no center. While undoubtedly a Deleuzoguattarian idea, this book endeavors to explore its origins and echoes across various thinkers and domains. In this context, it examines and analyzes the concepts of monstrous machine, transindividual machine, plastic machine, abstract machine and biopolitical machine as they appear in the works of George Canguilhem, Gilbert Simondon, Catherine Malabou, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben. Machinic Ontology is essential reading for all scholars and researchers in metaphysics especially those interested in the nature of living and non-living entities and natural systems.

In this chapter, I attempt to explain how in Deleuze’s thought sense is both ideational and material. To do this, I focus on Deleuze’s reading of Kant’s “Transcendental Ideas” in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense and elaborate on the link that he makes between Ideas and problems. Next, through a reading of Albert Lautman, I give a realist account of this transcendental idealism. And finally, I connect this dynamic and genetic realism with a transcendental materialism and conclude the materiality of sense as the transcendental field. This entails a change of direction from focusing on sense as the transcendental surface to nonsense as the transcendental depth which underlies turning from the language of transcendental philosophy towards the language of psychoanalysis, and is the result of Deleuze’s replacement of the unconscious as the transcendental field for Sartre’s consciousness.

Deleuze’s Logic of Sense should be taken as an attempt to respond to the need to reverse classical Aristotelian logic, a need which is proposed first by the ancient Stoics, then by Lewis Carroll, and finally by the emergence of modern logic in the works of Frege and Russell. Deleuze, in Logic of Sense, gives an extensive account of these moments in the history of logic and takes them as his departure point to formulate his logic of sense. In this and the next chapters, I study the relationship between Deleuze’s logic and modern logic by focusing on the work of Gottlob Frege before continuing on to Deleuze’s reading of the Stoics and of Lewis Carroll in the following chapters.

One of the main themes of Deleuze’s Logic ofSense is the possibility of the communication of divergent series without reducing them in a connection, continuity or convergence. Taking divergent series as convergent (and heterogeneities as homogeneous) marks an illusionary communication, not a real one. The real and non-reductive communication, which Deleuze sometimes calls resonance, entails an element of forced movement, an element that takes several names in the course of Logic of Sense: paradoxical element, aleatory point, object=x, nomadic instance, esoteric word, etc. This element is not determined by an external agent, but it randomly determines itself and produces experimental and contingent determinations. This brings about a new idea of freedom and chance. Everything is determined by a paradoxical element or an aleatory instance. Everything gains its sense from nonsense. Introducing events as submitted to fatality is an attempt to find a third way between determinism and freedom, and this would be possible only through seeking a connection between nature and human being by the introduction of this nomadic movement as a common source that motivates their movements. What connects external nature and human nature is neither determinism nor freedom, but this third realm of fatal events. We are not determined, neither by an external divine force, nor an internal self-consciousness. We are determined by a mad aleatory determinator. And the same is the case about the rest of nature. It is in this sense that, in the course of Logic of Sense, one can ascribe a naturalism to Deleuze, a kind of transcendental naturalism that connects human nature and nature as the great outdoors. At the point of this transcendental naturalism, sense finds its nonsensical element and its logic joins its ontology. At this point, what is free in nature (free matter) joins the feeling of freedom in a consciousness and turns it to unconscious.

This chapter centers our reading of Deleuze’s contingent (ir)rationalism and on this basis responds to the contemporary Cartesian tendencies in philosophy that build their critique of Deleuze around a negligence of the essential contingency in his philosophical system. Although this line of thought initially brings us to Alain Badiou, but I prefer to discuss two of Badiou’s disciples, namely Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier, who made more clear confrontations with Deleuze regarding our discussed issues. Particularly, I respond to an accusation that they both charge on Deleuze, namely a spiritualist account of vitalism. I try to explain how Deleuze’s contingent and (ir)rational vitalism cannot and should not be considered a continuum of conscious reasoning and subjectivity. This takes me again to Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz’s principle of reason, but this time I focus on his book on Leibniz, namely The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.

At the beginning of Logic of Sense, Deleuze defines paradox as “the affirmation of both senses or directions at once” (“le paradoxe est l’affirmation des deux sens a la fois”; LdS 9; LoS 1), and then he elaborates different paradoxes of sense. Thus, there are several aspects on which sense implies the affirmation of two directions at once. This affirmation is crucial to sense. As Paul Livingston in his chapter on Deleuze declares, the paradoxical aspect of sense is connected to the way it underlies becoming: “Sense for Deleuze also underlies the instability of meaning and, even more generally, the phenomena of change, flux, and becoming”, and he continues by claiming that the paradoxical aspect or the “bidirectionality” of sense “is necessary for understanding change and becoming” (Livingston, 2012: 96–97). In this regard, Deleuze’s account of sense is related to the second type of being which Plato recognizes in Parmenides and Philebus: “Pure becoming without measure, a veritable becoming-mad which never rests … and indocile matter” (LdS 9; LoS 1–2). Plato’s examples of these entities are that which is denoted by the words such as “hotter”, “colder” or “younger.” They do not denote the stable and established beings which suppose pauses and rests to be able to receive the action of the Ideas. They denote being as becoming, being as expressing itself in a diversity of modes. And as Plato’s examples indicate, being as becoming appears only in language. It is being as sense, as linguistic sense. The change that Deleuze makes here is replacing Plato’s comparative adjectives with infinitive verbs (this replacement is based on the Stoic reading and will be discussed in detail in next chapter). This replacement entails a move from “becoming” to “the event”.

The relationship between logic as the theory of knowledge and ontology as the theory of existence constitutes the core problem of most post-Kantian philosophy. In order to make such a connection between logic and ontology possible, post-Kantian philosophers had to introduce a third realm distinct from the subjective realm of knowledge and the objective realm of being. To mention just a few examples, one can think of Hegel’s absolute spirit, Husserl’s perceptual noema, or Heidegger’s being-there (Dasein). Indeed, this search for the third realm begins in Kant’s own work, with the idea of “synthetic a priori”. He insists that in order to bridge the gap between logic and ontology, or between knowledge and existence (cognition and objects), we need migration from formal logic, or what he calls “general logic”, towards transcendental logic, and the main characteristic of transcendental logic is that it entails the a priori synthesis of logical entities (judgments). But Kant subjectifies the realm of the synthetic a priori and reduces it to one of the existing realms, and therefore fails in constructing a real transcendental logic in which synthesis is possible. It is regarding this problem that post-Kantian philosophy distances itself from Kant and begins a new effort to build the so-called third realm in which the real synthesis of logic and ontology takes place.

Deleuze is famously an anti-Hegelian, for he criticizes Hegel’s philosophy, specifically in Nietzsche and Philosophy and in Difference and Repetition, for how it takes negativity to be the principal force and the motor of the dialectical movement. In Deleuze’s view, negativity is a conceptual result and has no capacity to provide the element of an original force. But, on the other hand, Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism holds powerful connections with post-Kantian philosophy, which is discussed in detail in our sixth chapter. In this regard, there would be a systemic Hegelianism in Deleuze, if one compares the ways two philosophers respond to the Kantian problematic through Maimon and Fichte. In what follows, I am not going to explore this general comparison between Hegel and Deleuze (a task which is done by Henry Somers-Hall, 2012), but I will instead focus on Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and how it can be considered a Hegelian move to bridge the gap between logic and ontology.

The main aim of this chapter is to unpack Deleuze’s interpretation of Stoic logic in Logic of Sense. It is in this regard that I also discuss his account of Stoic (metaphysical) physics and Stoic ethics. According to “the aphorism-anecdote” that Deleuze quotes from Diogenes Laertius in Twenties Series on the Moral Problem in Stoic Philosophy, the Stoics take the parts of philosophy, in so far as they cannot be separated, as though they can be distinguished: “Diogenes Laertius relates that the Stoics compared philosophy to an egg: ‘The shell is Logic, next comes the white, Ethics, and the yoke in the center is Physics’” (LdS 167; LoS 142). Deleuze uses this allegory to show how Stoic ethics is intertwined with logic and physics.

Up until now, Deleuze has been described as a transcendental philosopher who, despite constantly criticizing the philosophers of the transcendental tradition, never ceases to tackle the problem of the transcendental, which is to say, the conditions of experience. Therefore, he introduces his own version of the transcendental philosophy which underlies the materialization of the transcendental and deserves to be called transcendental materialism. But at the same time, a tendency is visible throughout Logic of Sense to abandon the language of transcendental philosophy, a tendency that remained with him for his entire career. His blatant preference of Antonin Artaud over Lewis Carroll or the generous praise he gives to pre-Socratic philosophers despite of spending a large part of Logic of Sense to the Stoics are examples of such a tendency. But at the end of the book, this tendency finds an extensive and systematic elaboration, when he turns towards psychoanalysis. This chapter aims to give a reading of this part in view of what we already discussed up until now.

In the course of Logic of Sense, Deleuze insists on the irreducibility of the inherent paradox of sense, which is, its impassibility and neutrality from one side and its productivity and genesis from the other. In order to emphasize this paradox, he introduces Stoic double causality, and ascribes a will to “the indifference.” These two aspects correspond with two sides of Stoic ethics: Aion as the neutrality of the incorporeal subsistence, and bad Chronos as the material generation of the simulacra. The paradox is the point where these two sides meet. It finds several names in the course of Logic of Sense: in addition to “Chrysippus’ paradox” and “Frege’s paradox” which are discussed in previous chapters, we have “Carroll’s paradox”, “Meinong’s Paradox”, “Robinson’s paradox”, “Lévi-Strauss’ paradox”, etc. In this chapter, I focus on Carroll’s paradox and explicate how Deleuze uses this paradox to introduce his logic of sense as a logic of nonsense. We will also see how all the paradoxes are different names for the same thing, but since that thing is moving by nature and is absent from its own place, its name also changes again and again.

The main aim of this chapter is to tackle Deleuze’s contribution to post-Kantian transcendental philosophy by introducing a new account of the transcendental which can be called the immanent, or real, transcendental, and which entails real conditioning as production or generation. This amounts to an explanation of a title that describes Deleuze’s early philosophy well, namely “transcendental empiricism” which deals with experience at the level of transcendental sensibility or, in Deleuze’s term, sense. In this way, he disavows attaining the transcendental from subjectivity or any recourse to concepts. Thus, Deleuze ascribes an objectivity, or better, a materiality, to the transcendental which is not differentiated in the form of objects (Deleuze assigns the term “objectité”, and not objectivité, to the transcendental field to distinguish it from the empirical objectivity; LdS 72–73). He learns from Kant that the objects are the correlates of subjects and this correlation underlies the application of concepts. Thus, he blames Kant for taking one side of this correlation as the condition of the other because in this way the conditioning would be just formal. Deleuze searches for a real conditioning and defines it as generating. Therefore, the condition must be essentially different from the conditioned and should not be located in the subject and in already established objects. In this regard, Deleuze introduces sense as the transcendental field. In his term, sense is the ideational material and marks the genesis of the entities of the empirical field. In the course of the present chapter, I try to explain how Deleuze makes a reconciliation between sense as the transcendental sensibility and sense as the source of intelligibility. This would be possible if we consider it the real transcendental field.