Levi on virtualism

LEVI WITH ANOTHER GREAT POST, this time on Deleuze and DeLanda’s fondness for the virtual. If anything, I’m even more bothered than Levi is by this maneuver, and for much the same reason that Levi outlines.

Interestingly, if you ask DeLanda what his objections are to Bhaskar (he greatly admires him) his main objection is that Bhaskar still believes in essence, which DeLanda wants to replace with a thing’s entire generative history (a Bergsonian move, probably picked up via Deleuze: nothing is lost, all is remembered).

Speaking of DeLanda, the past two months have been so ridiculously busy that I haven’t had time yet to finish the very nice-looking manuscript of his new book, which is sitting on my desktop. Perhaps he won’t mind if I offer a few “teasers” in December, though I won’t feel comfortable quoting much from an unpublished book.

As stated in a lecture in Norway last November (which will appear as a chapter in Towards Speculative Realism shortly) my sense from A New Philosophy of Society is that DeLanda was drifting from Deleuze more toward Bhaskar. We’ll have to see if that trend continues. Among other things, DeLanda’s 2006 book was less “Bergsonian” than his better-known Deleuze book of 2002… The talk of every atom retaining the entire history of its genesis was fading in 2006, in favor of a theory of “redundant causation” in which many different histories might lead to the same thing. This will be his first new book since then, and we’ll have to see which direction he’s moving. I didn’t get far enough into the ms. yet to make a judgment on that point.