Tim Gough

This paper revisits a recent essay by Stanford Anderson, where he analyses Peter Eisenman’s take on Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino. The two takes on that perspective diagram are read in the light of Gadamer’s notion of effective-historical consciousness (in Truth and Method), and Deleuze’s notion of the different/cation of the Idea (in Difference and Repetition). The argument is made in the context of architectural studies and practice that an unconventional framing of through would allow historical consciousness to be theory; and theory to be historical. This reframing in turn is shown, via an discussion of Maison Dom-ino, to have something constructive to say about the nature of architecture and architectural practice.

In conclusion Woelfflin outlines four formal characteristics of Classic Art: • repose, spaciousness, mass and size • simplification and lucidity • complexity • unity and inevitability The final of these is decisive: if classic art has a certain coldness, then this is surely to do with its respect of the predestined One, as Woelfflin's own comparison of Ghirlandaio's masterpiece with Leonardo's chilly Last Supper illustrates. For Woelfflin, the Classic is unified, and can be ascertained formally by an analysis of the form of the work, although he is careful to state that the work is much more than just form – a warning which is all too often not taken account of. In his various works on the 17th century thinkers Spinoza and Leibnitz, whose work he links with a specifically Baroque conception of the world, Gilles Deleuze contrasts their philosophies with “classic” philosophy, which runs as a specific stream from Aristotle through to Descartes. Classic philosophy is essentialist, whereby a thing is defined as that which fulfils its essence to a greater or lesser extent; and it is substantialist whereby a thing is defined as substance and therefore as form. As Deleuze says, substance is, at bottom, form. There is therefore a non-coincidental coherence between Woelfflin's formal method of ascertaining what classic art is, and the nature – in general – of the classic as defined philosophically. The classic is defined in classic fashion – by means of a unified essence and the form of a substance. What then of the Baroque? If there is a coherence between the abstract thought of classicism and the way in which classic art and architecture is defined, then can a similar link be made between the anti-classic philosophers of the Baroque age and Baroque architecture? Spinoza's question is not about essence, but about power: he famously asks in the Ethics: what can a body do? The thing is no longer a substance with a form, but is a collection of relations, a series of nested individualities to infinity, a series of folds to infinity. The relational character of reality extends, for the baroque, to the mathematics of integration and differentiation – dx/dy as the subsistence of the relation in the absence of its terms. This paper will explore these Baroque relationships with reference to the strands of classicism running through 17th century architecture and its rivalry with the “true” baroque.

If we accept that the method of experimental natural science operates within the milieu of hypothetical cause and effect categorical judgement, then the question may be asked whether wissenschaftlich thought (ie “scientific” thought more broadly defined than is usual in the English use of this word) exists only within this milieu. This paper will approach this question via the table of categories in Kant’s first critique (B106) where, in the third part “Of Relation”, he makes a distinction between relations “Of Causality and Dependence (cause and effect)” and those “Of Community (reciprocity between agent and patient) [der Gemeinschaft – Wechselwirkung zwischen dem Handelnden und Leidenden]”. In Kant’s transcendental method, each category is related back to functions of judgement, likewise outlined in a table (B95) (a table which Kant says he will “place before the eyes” - vor Augen stellen). The category of cause and effect is related to hypothetical judgement; the category of community is related to disjunctive judgement. The link between the category of community and disjunctive judgement is complex, Kant says, and he goes on to give a succinct and useful analysis of them: Now in a whole which is made up of things…. one thing is not subordinated, as effect, to another, as cause if its existence, but, simultaneously and reciprocally, is co-ordinated with it, as cause of the determination of the other…. This is quite a different kind of connection from that which is found in the mere relation [blossen Verhaeltnis ] of cause and effect… for in the latter relation the consequence does not in its turn reciprocally determine the ground The paper will: • compare this Kantian classical duality between “cause and effect” and “community” with Deleuze’s championing of the stoic logic of cause and effect which (as he says in the second series of Logic of Sense) brings about “an entirely new cleavage of the causal relation” posit that architectural experimentation is destined to occur within the milieu of reciprocity rather.

“If the question of Being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealment which it has brought about must be dissolved. We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of Being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being – the ways which have guided us ever since.” […Diese Aufgabe verstehen wir als die am Leitfaden der Seinsfrage sich vollziehende Destruktion des überlieferten Bestandes der antiken Ontologie auf die ursprünglichen Erfahrungen…] Being and Time has it that the “hardened tradition” of the “history of ontology” is to be made subject to a “destruction” which would return us to the “original experiences” which at the outset allowed the nature of Being to come forth. In the context of an unprecedented appropriation of the word deconstruction – now set to work as unambiguous signifier in all fields of culture from architecture (= wacky) to politics (=new New Labour) – this paper will interrogate the extent to which deconstruction was never anything other than Heidegger’s Destruktion. Does the deployment of Derrida’s word intend to return us to “those primordial experiences”? To what extent is the “de” of deconstruction a negative prefix? Is deconstruction a radical questioning of Destruktion?

Heidegger’s remark that the banks of the river (representing nature in its supposedly pure state) only become apparent because of the presence of the bridge (representing the artificial in its supposed opposition to that nature) will lead this presentation to a discussion of whether or not the idea of “nature” as prior to architecture remains unequivocally valid. If nature/the site - that which claims to come before the artificial/architecture - only appears as a result of the presence of the artifice/architecture, then the notion of nature/the site as original and prior to artifice/architecture is called into question. That question will in turn stimulate a particular thinking about place as the relationship, resonance, or play , between a number of sets of poles, including nature/architecture and building/subject . Thus a relational interpretation will be given to architecture and place. This interpretation will be informed, via Derrida’s exposition , by references to chora (place) in Plato’s Timaeus, recalling in turn that the word relates to non-static notions of place: to the chorus, the dance. The photographic work of Andras Gursky and Thomas Ruff, amongst others, may be used during the presentation.

Jacques Derrida, in Of Grammatology, addresses Rousseau’s concept of the primitive outlined in the Essay on the Origins of Language. In place of Rousseau’s classical derivation of language from the spoken word, Derrida famously proposes the mark or trace as a non-originary “origin”. This in turn leaves any notion of the primitive as ready for a deconstructive reading; that is, it posits that any notion of “the primitive” is a constructed (ie non-primitive) idea with a history and political intent. This paper will address to what extent does this theory of the mark and the questioning of the possibility of an origin present us with an essentially positive possibility of recasting architectural meaning outside a metaphysics which privileges the linguistic above certain of its “others”, for instance, materiality.

Deleuze, in Difference & Repetition, opposes Idea to concept. “The entire Idea is caught up in the mathematico-biological system of different/ciation.” (220) Concept is that of which Laugier, classically, speaks: the thought of architecture is that of static “firm principles” determining the architect’s judgement; concept exists in the realm of representation; the status of architecture is subsumed to the concept from which it derives; and the thought is, finally, merely expressed in the work. The Deleuzian Idea, by contrast, is anti-classical, anti-representational, anti-expressionist and genetic (anti-static). It is this by virtue of its status not as arché (principle) but as differentialising problem. As such, it exists in the intense play of difference and the eternal return of the same – which means for Deleuze (following Klossowski) not the return of the identical but the effect of primary difference. Thus architecture, thought outside the classical bind, can never be the translation of an apparently formal aspect of philosophy (the fold, for instance) into the form of architecture. Rather, as is said of art in Ozenfant/Jeanneret’s Purism manifesto, architecture raises space to the level of mathesis, and it does this as a genesis, as a development of the Idea by virtue of the process of differentiation (of the Idea as problem) and differenciation (of the actualisation of this) – “by posing the question of its own difference”(195). This genesis is a creative “triple genesis” of qualities, space and time, and concepts (173); thus architecture, as such a creative movement, does not follow concepts but rather generates them. A truly conceptual architecture does not begin, but ends, with the concept; and we can thus understand how it would be that philosophy, as conceptual, must perforce rely on the architectonic plan. It will be shown, in conclusion, that architecture will therefore stay true to Deleuze’s thought (in Logic of Sense) of the Event as that “battle which hovers over its own field…. neutral in relation to its temporal actualisations… all the more terrible.” (100).

This paper will return to the early work of Deleuze and his “destruction of”/”assertion of the construction of” (we might say “deconstruction of”) identities and subjects in Difference and Repetition (1994) and Logic of Sense (1990). Famously, all identities are renounced in the name on the one hand of a Nietzschean differences of force and on the other in the name of particularities. Identities are, at the limit, derived and constructed from difference, and difference is defined in itself as pure difference, not in relation to the same. Thus in Deleuze’s interpretation, the eternal return of the same speaks not of the return of something identical with what came before, but return as the generation of what we call the same. The same “is said of” difference, just as “univocal Being [God, self] is said of beings which are not univocal” (1990, 300). Thus Deleuze questions the great historic division of philosophy between on the one hand the pre-enlightenment centring of the infinite divine being and, on the other, the Kantian substitution of it by the finite self. For the self can only exist by virtue of God, and in this respect the enlightenment fools itself as to its own true footing: As long as we maintain the formal identity of the self, doesn’t the self remain subject to a divine order, and to a unique God who is its foundation? Klossowski insists that God is the sole guarantor of the identity of the self and of its substantive base… One cannot conserve the self without also holding onto God (294) Subsequent to this deconstruction, in what way does Deleuze’s distinction between the differentiation of the Idea and the differenciation of its actualisation inform the construction of, or “saying of”, identities; and what implications does this have for a post-humanist, post-subject thought? It will be argued that it is not a question simply of discarding the subject or the human, and in that sense “man” must remains a universal concern. However, Deleuze’s logic, in a similar way to the supplementary logic of Derrida, implies that the locus of the “universal” would be displaced from its pretensions as implying a grounding principle, a measure of all measures. It would instead feature as constant accompaniment – perhaps of the nature of a friend; as one of those ideas that remains universally within the field of investigation, but not as arché to that field. As we know, this strategy is not more profound than humanism and the philosophy of the subject. On the contrary, it reverts to the surface of which Deleuze speaks throughout The Logic of Sense (see particularly 4-11). Its strategy is otherwise, and thus, it will be shown, potentially effective.

David Velleman, in his paper How we get along (2007), quotes Blackburn on a limitation of analytical moral philosophy in respect of “the social as a determining feature of individual action and motivation” (Ruling Passions, 1998). This is in accordance with the phenomenon that a position’s strengths are generally much the same as its supposed weaknesses: to proceed in analytic fashion, in moral philosophy as elsewhere, is to focus on the particular, the dissolving or breaking-down of issues (Greek: analuein). This strength on the part of analytic philosophy tends to discourage the question of the social (as a subset, we could say, of all holistic questions, and such phenomena as existentialism, gestalt psychology etc). In this respect, we may consider that the question of the identity of the individual, particularly in respect of technology and new media, is not only one which lends itself effectively to an analytic approach (given the structural consonance between the particular and the individual), but that this question will only have become both possible and significant in the modern era, post-Descartes. In other words, we posit a feedback mechanism, a movement to-and-fro, operating through time, history and tradition, between philosophy, the possibilities it opens up, and the ways in which society “expresses” itself (via politics, law, institutions, technology), its concerns and its members. Now, within the analytical philosophy of this movement, the social does not at all disappear; rather, its analysis is generally and necessarily located after the positing and analysis of the individual and the particular. Thus the importance of disciplines such as psychology, that is, disciplines which, on the basis of the particular, look at connections between those particulars. For instance, David Shoemaker will state (in Reductionist Contractualism 2000), “I have very good reasons…. for cultivating… justifiability to all other selves with whom I am psychologically connected, given that they are, in a very real sense, extensions of me.” Here, the self, the individual, comes first in the analysis, to be followed by the question of how this self becomes or is connected. By contrast, avowedly holistic and anti-Cartesian discourses such as existentialism (most notoriously, Heidegger’s starting-point of Dasein) will tend to avoid positing individuals prior to “the whole” (however this is characterised) and will therefore not include psychological issues within their ambit. Of course, in each case, the starting point will be in some way overturned; Dasein retains an inevitably individualistic tone; Shoemaker states elsewhere by means of modus tollens (in The Irrelevance/incoherence of non-reductionism about personal identity 2002) that “[i]t is not the case that questions of identity will always have determinate answers. Thus, we are not separately existing entities.” This paper will suggest a systems approach to the question of ethics, the production of identity and the question of the “self” in respect of information technology; this is, the issue of the feedbacks occurring between thought (in all its guises), the possibilities opened by it, technology, law and politics will be foregrounded. Digital computers and their associated databases, as particular phenomena, can only be established, improved and in themselves correctly understood by means of analytical research; this does not necessarily rule out a non-analytic approach in respect of their encompassing “ecology”. The systems-approach to the ecology of databases will in this paper have an eye to such post-Nietzschian thought as that of Deleuze (in Difference and Repetition) and Derrida (in Différance 1967), in the sense that both start from the idea and experience of difference from which any concept of identity or sameness will come to be derived. Identity is constructed, in a ecological and hyper-mobile system of thought, law, politics and information technology. How, alongside (not contra) other approaches, might this inherently ambiguous enterprise help clarify ethical issues? • the specifics of individual cultures will be noted. Currently, the UK government is proceeding with development of a universal database of its residents, linked to an identity card supposedly guaranteed by biometric data (fingerprints, iris scans…). In a country with no tradition of identity cards - the very suggestion has only been possible in an atmosphere of “war on terror” - this endeavour has an ethical and political meaning different to other European states, and provides an example of how politicians can, by manipulating terminology (in this case, of “war”, since the only precedent in the UK for identity cards was the second world war) achieve technical results • similarly, the project of a universal UK health-care database, accessible in principle at all health-service locations and potentially by hundreds of thousands of individuals (including non-health-case professionals) is justified on broad technical grounds – that is, the more efficient use of state healthcare funds and the better care of patients. It is becoming increasingly clear that any digital database is per se vulnerable to inappropriate revelation, viz the recent loss of CD-ROMs with financial and identity details of 7 million children from the UK tax authorities. Politicians claim incorrectly that this vulnerability is a technical question amenable to technical (IT security) solutions; in fact, it is an ecological (and thus properly political) question relating to the human-centred environment in which the data is used. It is therefore per se not possible to protect against such security breaches by means of a technical solution. But in respect of health-care information, the status of the press, the privacy laws governing what it can reveal (and therefore how it can make its money) vary from state to state (compare the UK with France) and thus the ethic import of the necessary possibility of such security breaches will tend to vary. Similarly in the interaction with other fields such as insurance The paper will hypothesise a structural (arguably ethical and political) law in respect of these issues. This law states that in order for the development of technologically-driven databases relating to citizens to proceed, the data collected must necessarily be “inoculated”, that is, made relatively innocuous compared to the data’s previous status in a particular society. Since IT security is no defense against the data’s release, there will inevitably be a tendency for the data to become or be made “worthless” – which will be a structural, not-get-roundable defense. This movement is already inherent and effective in the project of transparency, freedom of information, secularisation and emancipation of western social structures. It is only possible for a doctor’s surgery to ask a patient their religion and record it in their database (as happens in the UK) if this information is relatively innocuous and does not lead to, say, persecution or prejudice against the individual. This goes for all data. The paper will conclude with a brief discussion of the possible consequences of this “law” of inoculation/innocuation for politics, ethics and the status of the individual.

For Deleuze, the exemplary novelist (Joyce, Proust, Robbe-Grillet…) disposes within original difference two heterogeneous series of signifier and signified (Sixth Series on Serialization ). These two series resonate through a single homogenous series of names where each term can be seen to relate to the preceding one and the next one, thus: n1→ n2→ n3→ n4→…. The first name, or signifier, relates to the second name/signifier, relates to the third etc in the familiar continuous chain of signifiers. It is the novelist’s task to consider this homogenous chain from the point of view of “that which alternates in this succession” – ie the alternation of signified and signifier through the terms - and to allow these to resonate. In what way is the architect a novelist, and in what way is exemplary architecture disposed according to this strategy of primary difference, homogenous chain of signifiers and the creative diagnosis of two resonating, heterogeneous series?

Defined space – be it in the realm of installation art, film/tv/stage/photography sets, architecture or urban/non-urban space – has a particular location in cultural physiognomy, played out in the question of the extent to which it provides a setting and “spielraum” for other activities (choreography, performance, the “Alltägliche”) and thus remains unthematised; and the extent to which via an intensified gaze these physiognoms become a theme - for media, cartography or a theoretical discourse. It has been argued (cf the work of H-G Gadamer) that an effective discussion of these phenomena can only occur outside the western metaphysical concept of aesthetics and outside the associated problematic of “meaning” – especially meaning considered in literary mode. This implies, simultaneously, a rethinking of meaning in terms of something akin to process, a concept which in turn would be deconstructed alongside that of figure/representation. This paper will investigate such an affirmative deconstruction of space.

As has been quoted, Seneca gives us the following aphorism in his last letter: unius bonum natura perficit, dei scilicet, alterius cura, hominis 'the good of the one, namely God, is fulfilled by his Nature; but that of the other, man, is fulfilled by care ' One paradox of our increasingly virtual existence is that the curatorial tendencies of the late twentieth century in relation to architecture and the city, influenced by archaeology, far from reducing the significance of the physical have tended to reify the material existence of built artefacts. Neither is it clear that this is merely the last stance of an outmoded ontology. It will be asserted that the physicality and materiality of the archaeologist - the exemplary materialist - is, after all, more virtual than virtuality 'itself'; and the impulses which allow the conventionally virtual to work effectively also give place for a more extreme materialist 'virtuality'. Clearly this assertion only makes sense spoken from a situation where our perfection is characterised as something like care. Care, here, is both: ~ that which allows our curatorial aspect to occur ~ that 'idea' evinced through the history of concrete acts of curatorship, widely defined This paper will take as a clue to this experience of care the recent curatorial strategy at Matt's Gallery, East London. The gallery, a low-value rented space, consists of two large columnated warehouse-type rooms, each with windows along one wall. Each exhibition is curated primarily by the artist themselves, with some collaboration with the gallery owner or other curators. Whilst an exhibition is proceeding in one of the spaces, the artist has three months to work in the adjacent space to bring the exhibition to the time of the opening. Exhibitions rhythmically move from one space to the other. We will remark particularly on those artists, for instance, Nelson, Robertson, Gunning, who work with the space in such a way as to project the curatorship, by means of an extended notion of 'installation', into the time of the exhibition itself. They do this, it will be argued, by calling on those who come to these spaces themselves to curate - to care - in participatory fashion. It will be shown: ~ that this curatorial experience has analogies in respect of the built environment ~ how this might impact on the in situ curation of cities and places ~ and how display and the museological imagination is caught in an everyday and not-so-everyday curation of urban and other places Finally, the paper will outline how this curatorship of the city and architecture affects and effects time.

There is an apparently paradoxical nature to resistance. Resistance is resistance against something, towards which it appears inimical. This resisted thing, however, requires such resistance in order to define itself and keep itself safe. Should it fail to do so, that which succeeds it will require resistance in turn. This paradox � a prevailing order requires that which is opposed to it, and that which overcomes is resisted in turn � occurs within time thought as a successive order of past, present and future moments. Two temporal displacements are evoked, not in order to resolve the paradox but to displace it and hint at an other strategy of resistance.

Derrida, in the interview Rhetoric of Drugs (1993), following on from the explication of the notion of pharmakon (both poison and beneficial drug, at the same time), outlines a possible “theory” of drugs and addiction. It has several key features: • there are no drugs in nature: the definition of “drug” is an institutionalised one • the concept of drugs is non-scientific, non-positive • drugs are a parasitism “at once accidental and essential”; and are thus a topic to which deconstruction, as a parasitical discourse (both in topic and in its nature), pays attention This paper will discuss how this “theory” of drugs can cast light on the nature of addiction and obsession. In pointing to the paradoxical and so-far self-defeating attempts to control drug use, supply, and the obsessions which feed of this, we will call into question whether a politics of representation can ever adequately address the problems raised by drug prohibition or whether indeed such problems need to be framed in a non-representational manner.

If agency signifies (first definition, and amongst other things) the ability to act, then architecturally this power is complex in the sense that it is deployed at one remove, that is, via agency (second definition), and such in at least two directions or registers: the agent acts both through others and for others. Taking its clue from an early written building contract, this paper discusses the role of the architect as agent in this light. On the one hand, the role of agent can be seen as a parasitical one, an unnecessary burden (financially and morally) on the “real” act of construction. In this sense, we might think of the ideal of a direct and perhaps more natural relationship between construction and inhabitant – a relationship unmediated by the law, the contract, and agency, a relationship where the architect is redundant. This status of the agent/architect is discussed in relation to Saint Paul’s notion of “sin” and the possibility of a salvation which is linked by Badiou to the gift, kharisma; and the paper concludes by positing what the nature of an architectural gift might be.

This paper will proceed, via a brief discussion of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s anti-aesthetics of architecture, to outline why the architectural metaphor in philosophy is never simply a metaphor, using as a guide the critique of origins and sources contained in Jacques Derrida’s essay Qual Quelle. The question will be raised as to whether the tools and structures of philosophy, such as the difference between materiality and non-materiality, abstract thought and practice, are entirely adequate to architectural debate; and whether, in questioning these structures, it is possible to address Bataille’s critique of architecture (as interpreted in Denis Hollier’s Against Architecture) as the expression of pre-existing social order and power.

Theories of complexity have developed from various strands of twentieth century scientific endeavour, including general systems theory, chaos theory, ecology, quantum mechanics, and economics. These disciplines, and their maturity into a set of theories around complexity, undoubtedly constitute one of the more fertile rhizomes of positive science. Parallel to the sciences of the twentieth century, one fertile rhizome of non-positive thought has been that represented by continental philosophy, more or less indebted to Husserl’s phenomenology and the opening of fundamental ontological questioning by Heidegger. This tradition of thought regards the sciences as regional, in the sense that they are characterised as dealing with a limited field of calculable positive knowledge, this being precisely their strength - and also their danger. This paper will argue that because of the potential and actual interrelations between these two rhizomes, theories of complex social systems are perhaps uniquely placed within the social sciences to take on board the critique of the positive intrinsic to the tradition of continental philosophy. The argument will be made that this is necessary if key questions which these theories face are to be given the required depth of complexity - such questions as how organisations can be effective and give space for essential human creativity; how to characterise the interrelations between the micro and macro levels of organisations, in particular recognising a to-and-fro movement which goes beyond cause-and-effect; and the possibility of justice within organisational and social systems.

In The Logic of Sense Gilles Deleuze defines novelists/artists as "clinicians of civilisation". Great authors are more like doctors than their patients - in that, like great clinicians, they create a set of disorders out of disorder, a table or grouping of symptoms out of disparate symptoms, so that "it is not the [Freudian Oedipus] complex which provides us with information about Oedipus and Hamlet, but rather Oedipus and Hamlet who provide us with information about the complex". For Deleuze, this creation of disorders takes on a particular character. In truth, for him, these structurings are not created from "disorder", since that would be to define the "choasmos" of differences - "disorder" in common parlance - by means of the notion of order; that is, it would be to define differences in terms of sameness - something he had spent the whole of his preceding book, Difference and Repetition, battling against. Thus the creation of disorders can only occur within a field where originary difference has been proclaimed and acknowledged, and where every notion of the same or the one is derived from, or "said of" that which always and from the start differs. The exemplary novelist - Deleuze cites Joyce's Ulysses, Proust and Robbe-Grillet - disposes within this original difference two heterogeneous series of signifier and signified. These two series resonate through a single homogenous series of names where each term can be seen to relate to the preceding one and the next one, thus: n1 - n2 - n3 - n4... The first name, or signifier, relates to the second name/signifier, relates to the third etc in the familiar continuous chain of signifiers. But it is the novelist's task to consider this homogenous chain instead from the point of view of "that which alternates in this succession" - ie the alternation of signified and signifier through the terms - and to allow these to resonate. In the case of Joyce, for instance, there is a series surrounding "Bloom" which is given as the signifying set; and a corresponding signified series "Ulysses"; between which the author establishes a resonance and relation by various means. In the case of Robbe-Grillet, the two series operate on the smaller scale of descriptions of tiny "states of affairs" against "rigorous designations". In all cases, it is for Deleuze the differences between the series and their terms which "become [through the auspices of the author] primary", not the resemblances. This paper will attempt a preliminary transposition of these Deleuzian strategies onto a creative spatial field. Can a place be disposed according to this strategy of primary difference, homogenous chain of signifiers and the creative diagnosis of two resonating, heterogeneous series? In this case, what would constitute the two aspects of sense? How does this relate to the stoic disjunctive logic of the state of affairs of bodies and the entirely other order of "events", which hover over states of affair as "the battle hovers over its own field"? It will be shown that the creation of a place must, like literature, stay true to Deleuze's words in Difference and Repetition:... [it] opens on to the difference of Being by taking its own difference as object - in other works, by posing the question of its own difference