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ETHICS OF (IN)CAPACITY: BECOMING

Kathrin Thiele State University of New York at Buffalo/Europa Universitt Viadrina Frankfurt-Oder

To fail without fail: this is a sign of passivity (Blanchot, 1995)

Introduction In this paper I want to introduce the notion of becoming (as it is taken up in a Nietzschean, post-Heideggerian, and especially a Deleuzian tradition) as a figure of (in)capacity, as one expressing an ethical concern. In contrast to discussions of becoming stressing mainly its empowering, liberating, and transgressive potential, I would like to push it in a slightly different direction I want to highlight it as a highly demanding and infinite task, both in its theoretical conceptualization and its potential practical actualizations. Thus, to spell it out explicitly at this very beginning: the figure of becoming shouldnt be understood as any solution. Becoming always is a problem. It doesnt claim to solve the most difficult problems in philosophy, problems of subjectivity, being, or practice, but rather has to be seen as the very renewal of these questions themselves. My discussion will follow Deleuzes thought because it is often his thought of becoming that is still characterized as purely anarchic or transgressive, irrelevant to the more serious discussions of philosophy such as e.g. ethics. 1 Instead, however, of contrasting merely opposing ways to read becoming, this paper strives for something else. It wants to contribute to a
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I agree at this point with Alain Badiou who is right to argue against common (mis-)readings of Deleuzes work as purely anarchic and destructive of all philosophical tradition, and instead to emphasize the sobriety and lucidity with which Deleuze confronts (t)his tradition head on (cf. Badiou, Alain, Deleuze. The Clamor of Being, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

possible re-formulation of the still dominant, binary logic of capacity vs. incapacity, a logic of success vs. failure (a logic of either/or) into a more complex relation, something which can be called a relation of simultaneity, or a relation of co-existence (a logic of and). 2 Only when embedded in such a logic can the notion of becoming unfold all its potential. I want to show that, rather than excluding one another, (in)capacity is the expression of a transformational or (as Gilbert Simondon called it) a transductive relation 3 where the one side always produces and is the motor of the other. In order to develop my argument of an understanding of becoming as a figure of (in)capacity, it seems productive to translate the couple at stake here capacity/incapacity into terms of affectivity. Such a Spinozist re-formulation into the infinitive construction of to be affected and to affect isnt only fruitful because it translates the blocks of capacity on the one side and incapacity on the other into infinitive movements to be affected and to affect; but it also exemplifies that to affect the apparent part of capacity is always in need of its other, i.e. to first and foremost be affected so that movement starts at all. The logic of affectivity is, thus, a very complex movement, moving in both directions at once. To affect and to be affected always go together; the one subsists or inheres in the other . Without being affected no affect or
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Such a re-formulation argues first and foremost against any simple opposition of capacity vs. incapacity (locating both dimensions on one and the same level and opposing them to each other, such as traditional positivist and rationalist approaches have done). However, my argument also wants to point out problems with discussions of anteriority according to which incapacity comes before capacity, i.e. the location of capacity and incapacity on distinct levels, thus, giving incapacity a constitutive role but at the cost of completely separating the two as much as weve seen it in the first case. In order not to reduce the couple to any binary opposition, at the same time as not to make the two sides the same, we have to think them as related in a very strange simultaneity: (in)capacity. This is the difficult task: to think a relation in which there is no hierarchy between the two dimensions, in which both are distinct, yet always in need of the other, a need neither can do without, which yet never acquires the status of a lack since both dimensions always already come together they are inseparable; a relation of simultaneity, but one in which the elements which are constitutive of this relation are only constituted in this very relation; it is to think the ontological difference on but one level without collapsing difference into identity. 3 Cf. Simondon, Gilbert, The Genesis of the Individual in Crary/Kwinter (ed.) Incorporations, 1992, p. 297-319. Transduction for Simondon describes a process be it physical, biological, mental or social in which an activity gradually sets itself in motion, propagating within a given area, through a structuration of the different zones of the area over which it operates (313).

effect can ever take place. But also and this I think is particularly interesting in a discussion of (in)capacity understood in the Blanchotian sense of to fail without fail this movement will never be able to stop here and hold this status of being affected as its own body or within a body of its own. Any radical logic of (in)capacity, affectivity, or becoming, defies (or is (in)capable of) such a claim of property and propriety. To think of the notion of radical passivity as it is conceptualized in the Blanchotian and Levinasian tradition might help to grasp what I am referring to here. Thomas Carl Wall, in his book Radical Passivity. Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben, defines it in the following way: passivity in the radical sense, before it is simply opposed to activity, is passive with regard to itself, and thus it submits to itself as though it were an exterior power (Wall, 1999:1). To understand becoming as a movement expressing ethos is, thus, a matter of how we understand the becoming affected. The loss of a certain willful ability, a figure so fundamental to ethical thought, must be thought so radically passive that it is not only passive to anything outside itself but also, and maybe most importantly, to itself and, thus, be its own other. Everything a radically passive body encounters does something to it, i.e. it has an effect on it. Yet this effect cannot be absorbed into any realm of being. It will necessarily move on, escape, and lead to further affection. What the language of affectivity may provide us with is, thus, the articulation of a different logic where metamorphoses substitute for essences and movements for properties. Radical passivity, (in)capacity, and affectivity the movements of becoming arent stable aggregates but metamorphosing movements. Their ground is movement itself becoming.4 If this
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One would have to specify the whole problematic of grounding in philosophy and the way it is taken up by the thinker in question here, i.e. Gilles Deleuze. Since this paper doesnt allow such a discussion I refer the reader to DR, esp. chapter 3 The Image of Thought in which Deleuze addresses this problem in detail and concludes: To ground is to metamorphose (154).

movement is stopped in order to acquire a separable being, such a becoming loses what is most characteristic of it, namely to relate in a different modus than opposition and the division of a subject on the one side and its object on the other side. Such a movement can no longer be called a willful action which an I can engender or fulfill. Rather, the I must go down, it must undergo the movements of (in)ability in order to affect itself with maximum intensification. Becoming is radical passivity.

(Ethical) Becoming To find an answer to the question what is becoming, makes everything seem blocked from the very start. Becoming if we take it seriously, which here means to take it literally isnt in any traditionally understood ontological sense. This, however, doesnt mean that it is not in the sense of it is nothing.5 Becoming isnt because it describes a movement and not an essence. There is no other being of becoming but this movement: to become is another expression for to move which is another expression for to transform (and the series goes on). One could therefore say that while becoming has no ontological essence, becoming nonetheless is ontological. We now, however, enter an ontology of becoming, of movement, with a different temporality, instead of one of Being, spatializing and freezing these movements.6 We already see that to approach our theme in any direct manner is impossible. It is one of the
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[B]ut non-being is not the being of the negative ; rather it is the being of the problematic, the being of problem and questionnon-being is DifferenceFor this reason non-being should rather be written (non)-being or better still ?beingBeyond contradiction, difference beyond non-being, (non)-being; beyond the negative, problems and questions. (DR:64) 6 The frame of this paper cannot do any justice to such a difficult theme as the ontology of becoming or ontology of time. For the development of such a thought as fundamental to the production of a new, a different thought overcoming the obvious limitations of a logic of Being, the subject/object divide, a notion of time always approached through space, I refer the reader to Elizabeth Grosz work, especially to her book The Nick of Time. Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, 2004; also Grosz, Elizabeth (ed), Becomings, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1999.

badly posed questions against which Gilles Deleuze warns us, questions that try to fixate into presence that which always elude[s] the present (LS:1). 7 A concept of becoming that neither falls into reductive essentialization nor mere theoretical vagueness demands the re-formulation of the so familiar what-question, a question that always places itself above and judges what it wants to determine, into a question that follows or practices what it seeks. Instead of what is, one has to re-orient the question to a Foucaultian/Nietzschean how to, i.e. how to become, and understand becoming, therefore, as a task, a practice, a call which can only be responded to but never settled once and for all. It is in this sense that becoming is from the very start an imperative (but remember, this imperative is in the infinitive to become! it is something to be affected by). How to become, therefore. For my current purposes I choose the following expression of the many Deleuzian variations on becoming: How to become is to maximize ones (in)capacity to be affected while at the same time to intensify ones force to affect. Or to put it in slightly different terms: it means to precisely follow the fold of affectivity.8 For the time remaining, I would like to clarify two things: 1) how according to Deleuze we have to understand (and this means also to practice) the formula to be affected and to affect; and 2) in what ways the imperative in its infinitive form to become! leads us to a discussion of becoming as an
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For the problem of badly posed questions or false problems, cf. Deleuzes Bergsonism, 1997, p.17ff. This concern goes also back to Spinoza who in his Ethics articulates the problem of inadequate ideas as the philosophical problem, cf. Benedictus de Spinoza Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 8 This is only one, namely the Spinozist, way of expressing becoming in a Deleuzian sense. [B]ecoming is the concept itself (WPH: 110) for Deleuze, and thus one finds as many expressions of becoming as there are themes in different projects. In DR a new way of thinking related to the unthinkable; in LS a notion of sense as impassive event; in B the affirmation of life/duration as alteration, or the same interest in an even more radical way in NP where becoming is linked to the logic of Overman and will to power; also geophilosophically expressed (with Guattari) as minoritarian becoming-other. A lot more should be said about the here chosen formula, as it is presenting the logic of affectivity only in very broad terms: in order to qualify affection/affectivity, Spinozas distinction of sad and joyful passions is fundamental. For him affectivity can only be increased with joy; sadness has the effect of subtraction or fixation, cf. Deleuzes Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 27; Benedictus de Spinoza Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

ethical task.

To affect and to be affected to be affected and to affect Hearing the formula to affect and be affected, the first question coming to mind seems to be: whom are we actually talking about? Who is to be affected and who affects here? It is difficult to re-present what could be called Deleuzes becoming-subjectivities, and many misrepresentations do circulate about them. Some might say this is Deleuzes problem. His style is so inconsistent. In my opinion, however, this is a very simplifying reading of a very difficult issue. There are good reasons why this thinker always finds such extreme conceptual personae9 (as he calls them) for the explication of his logic of becoming. By putting the Nietzschean Overman next to unconscious subjectivities such as machinic assemblages, the larval or minoritarian subject, or even the pack (never one, always many); by aligning statements such as the Overman is the superior form of everything that is because of that energy which is capable of transforming itself (DR:41), and (a bit further down) selves are larval subjects (78) since only they are able to undertake the forced movement [of thought] by becoming the patient of the dynamisms which express it (118/119); by creating such encounters Deleuze certainly does confuse at first sight. But in following him slowly one realizes that it is only such

It is important to note that Deleuze takes serious effort in inventing strategies to mask and complicate the question of authorship and subjectivity in philosophical arguments similar to his philosophical predecessors (among others) Kierkegaard, Peguy, or Nietzsche. For Deleuze, philosophy is a question of style and a work, devoted to decentering philosophy and its subject, has to create a style, which not only postulates the destruction of the self but practices it, too. This is the reason why Deleuze himself so variously invents different conceptual personae. For a discussion of the relation of thought, philosophy, and conceptual personae cf. especially WPH, ch.1, but also the many texts Deleuze wrote on other thinkers such as Spinoza, Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Foucault to name only the ones in book length. While brilliantly masked and precisely to the point, these discussions often tell more about Deleuze than the true subjects of his texts. Though according to my knowledge unrelated to Deleuze, but very interestingly in this respect is the case of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa who in his writings created diverse heteronyms by which he transformed himself into a pure experimentation ground that expresses his organic tendencyto depersonalization and simulation (quoted in Agamben, see above, 117/118).

an affective multiplicity that alone is precise enough for a logic of becoming.10 To directly show what a becoming-subject is is impossible. Only by indirection and this means in an affective way will we be effective. In Deleuzes serializations like the one I just pointed to nothing remains what it is, everything (must) become(s)-other. Using such a strategy these becomings never acquire any stable identity. Closure remains inhibited by the radical exposition to always yet another series. The figure of becoming is, thus, both conceptually and practically, produced in the very in-betweenness that is its only mode of existence as movement itself.11 Within the logic of affectivity there is no subject/object dualism in which the former affects while the latter is affected. The passive self is not defined simply by receptivity (DR: 78), Deleuze writes. There is always something moving in this (in)capable self, and this is to be the only one capable of undergoing the movement of becoming the singular task to become as I would like to say more specifically. The movement to repeat this again is to become the patient of the dynamisms. It is to undergo a kind of athleticism as Deleuze puts it elsewhere.12 No pre-established subject can ever be the ground on which such a movement secondarily occurs or to which such an act happens. Subjectivity is always only the effect of such a practice, never its presupposed ground.
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Due to the shortness of this discussion, I rather crudely opposed the figure of the Overman to the one of larval subjects. In a more detailed Auseinandersetzung with Deleuzes Nietzscheanism one would of course realize that from the very start Deleuze reads the Overman and related concepts such as the will to power and the eternal return as figures of becoming in the radical sense of (in)capable movements. There is but one superiority of the Overman over man and this is that s/he isnt any longer (transcendentality) but always becomes, in the sense of becoming A LIFE (radical immanence). 11 In-betweenness as the only mode of existence of becoming could be further exemplified with Gilbert Simondons paradigm of becoming as that which always falls out of step with itself [ se dphaser par rapport lui-mme], cf. Simondon, Gilbert, The Genesis of the Individual, see above, 300. 12 Cf. Deleuze, Gilles The Logic of Sensation, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2003, esp. 13-19. It is important not to misunderstand this athleticism as any easy kind of gymnastics one exercise among others. Looking at the paintings of Francis Bacon one sees how disturbing and painful, how much loss and violence such athleticism implies. His figures are about deformation in the most radical sense. What is at stake here in this athleticism is the paradoxical experience Levinas describes most fruitfully in his discussion of shame: the paradox of being chained to oneself and yet the radical impulse to flee (cf. Levinas, E. On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

To give an example, think of Abraham; the Abraham of the story called The sacrifice of Isaac, which Kierkegaard so famously took up in his Fear and Trembling.13 There, a barely capable Abraham responds to a call so inhuman and murderous that only a fool or a monster would take it up. And think of the way in which Abraham responds HERE I AM!, he always says this even at the most abstruse end when he is all of a sudden prevented to kill his son though he first was asked to do so apparently by the same voice. And think of the way Kierkegaard praises this anti-hero as the true knight of faith who alone is able to produce a true movement which the I can never make.14 Abraham the stupid one, the murderous one, larval subject and Overman knew not only how to move (in such a way namely that in the end nothing happened) but also (as Kierkegaard says) he neither arrived too early nor too late (FT: 35). Both Abrahams (in)capacity in regard to his movements and the untimely timeliness produced thereby precision brought to its highest power , presents to us a movement of becoming: Did anything happen at all? Yet everything has happened!15

But we have to come back to the movement itself. To be affective a possible short version of our formula doesnt have anything to do with simple, uncritical affirmation. Affectivity, we could also see this in the Kierkegaard example, must be marked by precision a precision of course that is very different from gaining the highest knowledge in but one direction as I would
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Cf. Kierkegaard, Sren Fear and Trembling, ed. and trans. By Howard V. Hong/Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983 (FT). 14 But this movement I cannot make. (FT: 51). This is only one occasion among many in which the I expresses its (in)capacity. 15 Deleuze refers more than once to Kierkegaard as concerned with a philosophy of difference and repetition, i.e. of becoming. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze explicitly names Kierkegaards Abraham as the one who submits humorously to the law, but finds in that submission precisely the singularity of his only son whom the law commanded him to sacrifice (DR: 7). He then also links this Abraham to Nietzsches Zarathustra whose hatred of the law and amor fati (love of fate), aggression and acquiescence are [his] two faces (ibid.).

like to say in keeping with my vocabulary of movements. To be affective, i.e. to become, demands more than moving in just one direction there are always at least two as Deleuze says. In order to make this a bit more concrete, we have to move to yet another conceptual persona Deleuze mentions on different occasions in his work but thoroughly discusses only in The Logic of Sense the Stoics. It is because of their precision of movement that Deleuze speaks so fondly of the Stoics. They in their movement downwards from the heights of Platonism manage to produce the movement of (in)capacity (or becoming) we try to grasp here. The Stoics, contrary to the Platonic heights, discovered surface effects (LS: 7, my emphasis) Deleuze writes.16 It is important to dwell a little on this surface or surfacing movement of the Stoics in order to better understand what it means to be affective. Platonism establishes philosophy as an ascent:
Height is the properly Platonic Orient. The philosophers work is always determined as an ascent and a conversion, that is, as the movement of turning toward the high principle () from which the movement proceeds, and also of being determined, fulfilled, and known in the guise of such a motion. (LS: 127)

This is the ascent of the philosophy of Being; always searching for the highest, ultimate principle, which once and for all tells us what something is. A philosophy of becoming, on the other hand, (must) look(s) for a movement downwards from these heights. In following a Nietzschean tradition, Deleuze problematizes the presupposed one way street of thought and shows that thought rather than being an ascending movement has to be understood as an act, an event that is in line with other dimensions (128), i.e. it is moving simultaneously in different directions and, thus, complicates the notion of movement itself.

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The longer story is that the Stoics/pre-Socratics, according to Deleuze, were not only the background against which Platonism emerged, but that while there is the Stoic error of believing in a higher immanent measure according to which good and bad are inherently settled by Nature, i.e. the unity of a cosmic mixture (LS: 131), they are also the ones who are able to climb to the surface and receive an entirely new status (132).

Thought moves paradoxically.17 In turning his attention to the pre-Socratics, Deleuze discovers precisely such a movement. It begins with the already mentioned movement downward:
The pre-Socratic philosopher does not leave the cave; on the contrary, he thinks that we are not involved enough or sufficiently engulfed thereinThe pre-Socratic placed thought inside the caverns and life, in the deepTo the wings of the Platonic soul the sandal of Empedocles is opposed proving that he was of the earth, under the earth, and autochthonous. (ibid.)

It would, however, be too easy to stop here. Any straight movement downwards remains purely one-directional and is, thus, in no sense a movement of becoming. Such a movement might be courageous and transgressive, but for Deleuze it is not enough to simply ask of Plato to follow us downwards. The much more important question for him is where such a descent throw[s] us (135).18 And it is here that the Stoics show their real strength. They arent lost in the groundlessness of their mixtures but they find a way out: they are able to return to the surface. Though a lot more should be said about this very particular ability in quotation marks, the consequence of this paradoxical movement of return as we could call it is that
[r]eturned to the surface the [Stoic] sage discovers objects-events, all of them communicating in the void which constitutes their substance; he discovers the Aion in which they are sketched out and developed without ever filling it up [The event] is not the object as denoted, but the object as expressed or expressible, never present, but always already in the past and yet to come (136).

To be able to return to the surface is to produce the movement of becoming. 19 It is in such a


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Cf. Deleuzes definition of becoming as simultaneous movement in both directions at the very beginning of LS. He explicates with the example of Lewis Carrolls Alice who becomes larger: When I say Alice becomes larger, I mean that she becomes larger than she was. By the same token, however, she becomes smaller than she is now. Certainly, she is not bigger and smaller at the same time. She is larger now, she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes. This is the simultaneity of becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. (LS: 1) 18 While Deleuze in biographical terms remains relatively ambiguous about Nietzsches own (in)capacity of the necessary movements, he still doesnt want to diminish Nietzsches major influence for twisting the movement downwards one more time: Nietzsche was able to rediscover depth only after conquering the surfaces. But he did not remain at the surface, for the surface struck him as that which had to be assessed from the renewed perspective of an eye peering out from the depths. there arises a third image of philosophers. In relation to them, Nietzsches pronouncement is particularly apt: how profound these Greeks were as a consequence of their being superficial! (129) 19 This is very similar to what Blanchot says in The Writing of the Disaster about Platonism and the problem of writing and language: What Plato teaches us about Plato in the myth of the cave is that men in general are deprived

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movement that the static subject/object division, as fully present and separated from each other, is overcome and one arrives at the event always eluding the present, always already in the past and yet to come. The surface-movement we are encountering here isnt an immune subject who finally knows it all (this is only the clich of the Stoic sage) but it is the very (in)capable movement of following the event on its very own surface rejecting both heights and depths, i.e. rejecting everything we can think of as taking a hold on, rejecting all claims of property. The event is not the object as denoted but the object as expressed or expressible, weve just read. The event never is so to speak. All there is is infinite movement. The task of becoming is, thus, to follow the line of flight this singular way out like it was with the Stoics both without ever objectifying and without ever becoming a fully present subject of this itinerary it is, we can say, to remain (in)capable of this event. It is to affect in such a way that nothing really happens and yet everything has happened (Abraham). It is not to strive for the most outrageous outcome, nor to will what occurs but to will something in that which occurs (149) as Deleuze says; it is the impossible task to never get something solid in your hands but to approach the imperceptible line in-between heights and depths. This also means to never be what you are but to be infinitely exposed to transformation. Everything is asked from you in this movement. Deleuze speaks of the Stoic expertise to mime in the production of this movement.20 It means to be able to produce an effect of something the cause of which one never was and could never be. Such an act means to become a quasi-cause in the most serious sense, which, however, only a humorous (in)capable submission is able to produce.
of the power or the right to turn, or to turn back. And in the next fragment: To converse, it seems, is not only to turn away from saying what, thanks to language, is the present of a presence. To converse is also to turn language away from itself, maintaining it outside of all unity, outside even the unity of that which is. To converse is to divert language from itself by letting it differ and defer, answering with an always already to a not yet. (Blanchot, Maurice, The Writing of Disaster, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995: 34-35) 20 This isnt simply a metaphor for a performance or performativity but it has to be understood as an act.

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We are, however, not to be misled: to be capable of this movement has nothing to do with tragic heroism. Rather it is a question of loosing as in one loses it. It is to have faith in the absurd as Kierkegaard says. It is not a question of recognition, but a leaping in place of the whole body (149) a passion, a practice, an experiment. This movement of becoming might look stupid, even absurd; and the difference it makes is so difficult to detect that Kierkegaard in the case of Abraham finds for us the pettiest bourgeois picture imaginable when he wants to give him a more contemporary face: Abraham the tax collector! This is how an Abraham would look today, he says.21 Deleuze is a very fine reader of Kierkegaard when he points us to the becomingimperceptible of this Abraham, which doesnt mean to disappear but to become like everybody else (TP: 279), or in Kierkegaards own words: He [Abraham] belongs entirely to the world; no bourgeois philistine [Spiebrger] could belong to it more (FT: 39).22 Kierkegaard knew quite well that in the suspense-story he tells the tax collector is yet another unexpected shock but we know of Kierkegaards genius when it comes to humor!

To Become! Imperative in the Infinitive

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One would have to quote at length the passage in question in order to really bring across Kierkegaards genial and uniquely humorous description of his Abraham. Since this paper doesnt allow going into further detail I refer the reader to FT: 39f. 22 There is a similar argument made by Claire Colebrook in regard to Nietzsches strategy of the overcoming of the human which might be helpful to draw attention to at this point in order to further clarify the issue at stake here. According to Colebrook, Nietzsches [g]eneaology takes place as a positive repetition of becoming human; and it is through this repetition that human reactivism will activate itself as an effecta repetition of the will against life recognized as will activates the over-human. But this is not the overcoming of the human; it is a becoming human (Colebrook, Claire, A Grammar of Becoming. Strategy, Subjectivism, and Style , in: Grosz, Elizabeth (ed.) Becomings, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, 121). The here proposed everybody or citizen of the world (LS: 148) must be understood as such a radical repetition that instead of reaching somewhere beyond or above the human precisely becomes human.

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To come to my conclusion, what I hope to have shown in the preceding discussion is that the logic of becoming breaks with any dualistic distinction of to say it very broadly active and passive. I also hope to have contributed to a better understanding of the complexity of such a different mode of thinking. Becoming describes a paradox it is a paradoxical movement and as such always (im)possible or (in)capable. As should be clear by now, such (in)capability has nothing to do with any one-sided either/or. Rather, what is proposed here is the simultaneity of both sides at work in the manner I drew out in this paper. It is only then that the structural paradoxality and its expression in the infinitive: to become! is so fruitful to be read in an ethical way. We now deal, however, with a very different ethics than the one we are normally used to: the one of law and principles, the judgment of good and right, the shoulds and oughts. We speak of an ethical thought that doesnt claim any longer to find a direct way to good conduct by placing itself above its subjects and presenting itself as an unambiguous law. Rather, the ethical thought we speak of here affirms its absolute immanence there is nothing but this immanence; and, thus, there is nothing but the task to learn how to follow this immanence. While Deleuze never really elaborated such a different ethics in any particular text, his whole work nonetheless speaks an ethical concern everywhere.23 In his work, the ethical gesture is already there on the conceptual level of thought. Thought according to Deleuze isnt good just when it is well-thought or coherent, but only when it is creative, a thought to affect, to produce, and to think-otherwise. His task was never to find a closure to what thinking is, but it describes the continual effort to always produce thought as an event in-between essences. Thinking, thus, is becoming in the way I tried to explicate it in this paper. It isnt about the
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Strictly speaking, this everywhere is already my translation of Deleuzes erewhon, a notion he takes from the writer Samuel Butler, which can be read both as nowhere and as here and now. It is this paradoxical simultaneity, which is to be distinguished from ethical relativism, which we try to grasp in the movement or thought of becoming.

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measuring and appropriation of a territory, but the non-appropriative response to something which affects us.24 We, however, arent any prior ground on which secondarily becoming takes place. On the contrary, we are nothing but the very effect of this responding. The practical ethical question of such a thought no longer concerns what ought to be but rather what is to be done. Instead of knowing or finding out what is good and right, the ethical force of becoming is to be radically exposed to what comes next. The following series not to be understood as simple equations but as what Deleuze calls the tortuous circle of repetition (cf. DR: 57) makes this explicit:
the ethical imperative = to become = to become-other = to find a line of flight = to live.

We speak here of an ethicality which not only wants to understand ethics as an art to live but also thought or philosophy as a life. Such art to live isnt something to be acquired, but the exercise of an askesis (in the Foucaultian, not the Weberian sense). It is a technique of measuring where there is no measure (this is not the same as an inherent measure to believe in such a measure is the Stoic error for Deleuze); it is to dare the reality of something beyond dualities without taking from it its daring character by making a new program out of it (which everybody has to fulfill). It is a know-how to live that has nothing to do with what Derrida called in his very last interview to learn to live finally. 25 Deleuze joins him there when he called this task
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Here we find parallels between Deleuzes approach to thought and the deconstructive or Derridian approach to it as responding a call. The important moment for both is the encounter the movement of thought needs in order to create anything at all. 25 This is how Derridas Specters of Marx (trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994) begins, a passage Derrida was asked to further elaborate in his last interview in Le Monde August 31, 2004 Je suis en guerre contre moi-mme. Derrida replies to Birnbaums very first question where are you today with this desire to know how to live? in a much more extended way but he concludes: So then, to answer you plainly: no, I have never learned to live. Not at all! A statement so precisely formulated that it expresses what is at stake when we see life as an ethical task. Derrida complements this introductory statement with multiple references throughout the interview, but to follow Derridas thought of life would need another full paper. The here quoted source of the English version I am at War with Myself is found at www.truthout.org/docs_04/082704H.shtml.

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in his last essay Immanence: A LIFE ; or very early on in The Logic of Sense, a quote with which I also would like to conclude:
Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us Nothing more can be said and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event and to become the offspring of ones events and not of ones actions, for the action is itself produced by the offspring of the event. (149/150, my emphasis)

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