A Note on the Relation between tienne Souriaus Linstauration philosophique and Deleuze and Guattaris What is Philosophy?

From the beginning of his career, Deleuze always denounces confusions. This is especially evident in the 1968 Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza.i Thus it should not be surprising to see this theme reappear in his last great work (with Guattari), the 1991 What is Philosophy?: It is essential not to confuse the plane of immanence and the concepts that occupy it.ii It is perhaps impossible to understand What is Philosophy?, if one confuses the plane of immanence with concepts. To help us understand this difference, Deleuze and Guattari use different words to indicate what thought does in relation to the plane of immanence and in relation to concepts. In relation to the plane of immanence, thought institutes, while in relation to concepts it creates: Philosophy is at once concept creation and instituting of the plane (QPh 43-44/41, my emphasis). Note the different French nouns used here: cration and instauration. Now, as we can see, the English language translation of What is Philosophy? uses the word instituting to render the French instauration. There is no question that institution correctly translates instauration, and one can only ever feel sympathy for any translator since the translators task amounts to the most difficult choices among words and their nuances. Here however, the translation of the French instauration by the English institution perhaps covers over an important difference. Later in What is Philosophy? (in Chapter 4, Geophilosophy), when Deleuze and Guattari are saying that we moderns possess the concept but have lost sight of the plane of immanence, the French word institution appears. The English translation also renders this word as institution. Yet, the French institution appears in relation to what we moderns resort to since we seem unable to instaurate a plane of immanence: English law is a law of custom and convention, as the French is of contract (deductive system) and the German of institution (organic totality). When philosophy is reterritorialized on the State of Law, the philosopher becomes 1

philosophy professor; but for the German this is institution and foundation [institution et fondement], for the French it is by contract, and for the English it is solely by convention (QPh 101/106). Because the English translation renders both institution and instauration as institution, the English-language reader might think that throughout What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari are really German professors. The English translation seems to imply that the laying out or tracing these gestures or activities -- of a plane of immanence is what Germans do when they are philosophy professors in the State of Law.iii This confusion however between institution and instauration is not likely and therefore not serious. There is another confusion caused by the English translation, however, that is more likely and therefore more serious. What must be distinguished, what must not be confused are concept creation and plane instauration. The question is: what is the difference between creation and instauration? When Deleuze and Guattari speak of concept creation and the instauration of the plane (QPh 43-44/41, translation modifiediv), they cite what is today an obscure book: tienne Souriaus 1939 Linstauration philosophique.v In the note, they say, Aware of creative activity in philosophy, [Souriau] invoked a kind of plane of instauration as the soil of this creation, or philosopheme, animated by dynamisms (QPh 44n6/41n6, translation modified). Then they cite pages 62-63 of Linstauration philosophique. On these pages, Souriau says (and I quote at length in my own translation since no work of Souriau exists in English): In philosophy there are beings, and these beings are the purpose of the activity that the philosopher, insofar as he is a creator, deploys. The philosophical labor results in the work [uvre], and the work, by passing the shock back, illuminates the world from which it came. And there, in this double relation, resides something (so to speak) mysterious that is very essential to the very nature of philosophy. For, all we need is a little reflection to sense that the drive, the current that draws the macrocosm toward the microcosm in which it is in some way expressed, toward the philosopheme, is not contained within the framework of the relation of cause and effect. The philosopheme is not a simple result of the collection of activities and circumstances from which it came. Moreover, it is not a simple making conscious. When placed at the intersection of a variety of the multiple currents in which he bathes spiritually, the philosopher-subject is not content with intimate contact and 2

interior knowledge of those currents that run over him. He, so to speak, grasps them, and elevates them outside of himself in order to make them concrete and separate in a closed world, in a being that is more or less sufficient unto itself. Do you know how one used to make those beautiful tissue papers that would cover capricious little glitzy ornaments? One poured into a bucket of water some buoyant colors that one moved with a reed, making the colors undulate with the movement of the water. And when the colors looked good, one collected them up with the sheet of paper, which was then dried. Even to suppose that the philosopher attracts only a reflection the shimmering in his mind from thinking of the multiple actions of the world upon him and of him in his reactions still it is necessary that he capture it, this reflection, and posit it separately in this microcosm of the philosopheme. The gesture that brings, that reconstitutes, that constitutes in a separate and completely spiritual world, that posits all these reflections at the end separately in being, this is the philosophical gesture par excellence. The meditation moves, tosses, and orders somehow or other a cosmic content. The instauration grasps, filters, retains and posits separately the essential acts that structure this meditation. And it manages to be able to present them in a separate monument, as in a paradigm, by means of which then one will be able to see the world again. In any case, intuition, meditation, and reflection itself are still only preparatory acts. They are unleavened bread: imperfect sketch, existence that has not yet undergone the essential test of emancipation and of autonomous subsistence.vi In this passage, we see several similarities with Deleuze and Guattaris descriptions in What is Philosophy?. First, the philosopheme, like the plane immanence and its diagrammatic features, depends on something like an intuition, a meditation, or a reflection (QPh 42/40). Second, the philosopheme is based on a reflection of a cosmic content similar to a reflection on chaos, chaos being suggested by the figure of the undulating water (QPh 44/42). But most importantly, there are actions of instauration grasping, filtering, retaining, and positing which resemble the action of laying out and tracing, making a map of the plane of immanence. These actions, being the philosophical gesture par excellence, are not mere intuitions. They posit the structure of the meditation or intuition in a separate monument; they give subsistence and reality to the plane of immanence, a reality, according to Souriau, that is spiritual. Souriau uses the word instauration throughout his book because he thinks the word instauration expresses the spiritual being of philosophy better than the word creation. It allows

him to avoid the word creation. I am going to quote at length again a passage from Linstauration philosophique. This is the only time in the book that he pauses over the word instauration: It is certainly not useless to have noted this constitutive characteristic of philosophical thought, namely, that philosophical thought tends toward the work [uvre] toward the monumental, toward a singularity, toward a being that constitutes the philosophical ousia. Philosophical thought belongs therefore to the genre of instaurative thought. This word instauration, which is here being used without it being stressed, avoids the word creation, which is full of traps. From one viewpoint, man creates nothing. Nature itself creates nothing. The opening of the bud does not create the rose. All of its material conditions were there. The form is the sole thing that is new. Novelty is immaterial and, naturally, the immaterial is alone new.vii The trap that creation involves for Souirau lies in the belief that what is created is material. But even the materiality of creation is not what Souriau is really trying to avoid with the word instauration. We understand what he is trying to avoid only in a note that he adds to the passage just quoted: From the semantic viewpoint it is possible to observe a very interesting nuance in regard to this word [instauration]. In the modern usage, its sense is that of solemn establishment, of an institution, a ceremony, a function, a way of making or doing, in short, a not strictly material reality. But in Latin instauratio and instaurare imply the idea of a restoration, of a recommencement, of a renovation, or better, of a resumption, definitive this time, of what had not been able to be brought to fruition the first time. Instaurativi ludi (restorative games) are those games that are celebrated in place of those that had been interrupted. The modern use is easily understood in contrast to restore, a contrast that has pushed instaurate to the side of: to establish for the first time. But it is legitimate to preserve in its meaning, from the Latin origin of the word, the idea that creation is not what is at issue, that the inventive or anecdotally first is not what is in question, that to instaurate means less to establish a thing, a moral or a physical being, temporally than to establish it spiritually, and to constitute it, to grant to it reality in its own genus.viii In this quote, we again see Souriau stress the spirituality of instauration: unlike instauration, creation is material. Yet, when he distinguishes the modern sense of the word from the Latin sense, we see that something else is at stake. The modern sense of the word instauration, especially when it is contrasted with restore, ends up on the side of to establish for the first time. In other words, it looks no different from creation. His insistence on the Latin sense shows us that the distinction between creation and instauration is the distinction between temporal establishment and spiritual 4

establishment. It seems to me that this distinction in Souriau corresponds to Deleuze and Guattaris attempt to separate philosophical time from the history of philosophy. The history of philosophy (or history itself) is succession, while philosophical time (what Souriau is calling spiritual establishment) is coexistence and superposition. So, we might think that Deleuze and Guattari intend instauration to refer to this sense of spiritual establishment (becoming in Deleuze and Guattaris terminology) that characterizes philosophical time. Instauration would refer to superposition and coexistence (becoming), while creation would refer to succession. Yet, when Deleuze and Guattari speak of the creation of concepts, they clearly do not mean the sense of temporal establishment from which Souriau is trying to distance himself, a sense of creation that seems to assume independent points of succession: the first time, the second time, and so on. The instauration of the plane of immanence and the creation of concepts, both of these activities, result in coexistence, not succession. They both have spiritual reality. What then really distinguishes the instauration of the plane from the creation of concepts in Deleuze and Guattari? Let us return to the sentence in the note where Souriau presents the Latin sense of instauration: In Latin instauratio and instaurare imply the idea of a restoration, of a recommencement, of a renovation, or better, of a resumption, definitive this time, of what had not been able to be brought to fruition the first time (my emphasis). What Souriau wants to retain from the Latin sense of the word is the idea of doing something over again. Succession not only includes independent points, it also excludes repetition. Although we would have to think that concept creation in Deleuze and Guattari would have to include repetition after all Deleuze wrote a book called Difference and Repetition we are approaching an answer to our question. Let us quote one more time the same sentence about the Latin sense of instauration, but this time with different emphasis: In Latin instauratio and instaurare imply the idea of a restoration, of a recommencement, of a renovation, or better, of a resumption, definitive this time, of what had not 5

been able to be [qui navait pu tre] brought to fruition the first time. In instauration and creation, the repetition is necessary. Yet, in instauration, the necessity arises not only because nothing can be produced without using previous traits, functions, and features. The necessity also arises because the instauration was not possible the first time. It is this not possible or this what had not been able to be that distinguishes instauration from creation in Deleuze and Guattari. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari think that concepts have been and can be created; creation is possible; it can be achieved. To lay out a plane of immanence without any transcendence whatsoever, that is impossible or, as Deleuze and Guattari say, it happened once, in order to show, that one time, the possibility of the impossible. Thus Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers (QPh59/60). In other words, if leave to the side the extraordinary case of Spinoza, instauration leads to a very different experience than that of creation, or, better, it leads to the experience that is at the root of concept creation. Instauration leads to the experience of the impossible: We shall say that THE plane of immanence is, at the same time, that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought (QPh 59/59, Deleuze and Guattaris capitalization of the, my emphasis of cannot).ix Because the plane of immanence is never able to be completely achieved, since the planes of immanence that have been laid out can never be the best (except, once more, for that of Spinoza, and perhaps Bergson [QPh 50/48-49]), the plane of immanence always requires another (albeit necessarily insufficient) instauration. Therefore, we shall conclude by returning to our translation problem. If we were going to translate the title of Souriaus book into English, we would have to render it in this way: not as Philosophical Creation, not as Philosophical Instauration, but only as Philosophical Restoration.

Leonard Lawlor March 11, 2011

Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problme de lexpression (Paris: Minuit, 1968), pp. 37, 38, and 39; English translation by Martin Joughin as Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990), pp. 46, 47, and 48. ii Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Quest-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991), p. 42; English translation by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell as What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 39, my emphasis. Hereafter cited with the abbreviation QPh, with reference first to the French, then to the English translation. iii One should be aware that Merleau-Ponty in the 1950s had used the word institution to characterize his own thinking. He used this word to render the Husserlian or phenomenological term, Stiftung. See Maurice MerleauPonty, Institution and Passivity, trs., Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010). While in certain respects Deleuzes idea of instauration resembles Merleau-Pontys institution, the two differ (at least at the most superficial way) insofar as instauration is non-historical in Deleuze, while institution is the very definition of history for Merleau-Ponty. iv The word instauration exists in English as in Francis Bacons The Great Instauration. v tienne Souriau, Linstauration philosophique (Paris: Alcan, 1939). It appears that at the moment of his death in 1979, Souriau was already very much forgotten. Today it looks no different. See Luce de Vitry Maubrey, Etienne Souriaus Cosmic Vision and the Coming-into-its-Own of the Platonic Other, in Man and World (now Continental Philosophy Review) 18: 325-345 (1985). vi Souriau, Linstauration philosophique, pp. 62-63. vii Souriau, Linstauration philosophique, pp. 73-74. viii Souriau, Linstauration philosophique, p. 73n1. ix See also Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980), p. 329; English translation by Brian Massumi as A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 269.