1    

Thinking  the  Multiple  in/as/or  Canada:  Itinerary  of  a  Question  

Ian  Angus  

Department  of  Humanities  

Simon  Fraser  University  

 

I  have  followed  a  trajectory  of  thought  that  was  opened  up  by  Canadian  debates  

concerning  multiculturalism  but  has  not  remained  confined  to  it.  This  trajectory  has  

not  been  indebted  to  Deleuze’s  philosophy  in  its  articulation,  though  now,  through  a  

dialogue  with  Deleuze,  I  want  to  address  several  issues  that  it  leaves  outstanding.    

Let  me  begin  by  mentioning  three  optics,  moving  from  largest  to  most  local,  that  

do  not  fit  into  each  other  nicely  like  Ukrainian  Matryoshka  dolls,  but  which  

nevertheless  are  implicated  in  the  contemporary  question  of  diversity.  They  are  

plateaus  in  the  sense  that  Deleuze  and  Guattari  appropriate  from  Bateson  to  

designate  “a  continuous,  self-­‐vibrating  region  of  intensities  whose  development  

avoids  any  orientation  toward  a  culmination  point  or  external  end.”1  Additionally,  as  

Bateson  said,  it  is  a  logic  whose  progression  is  without  climax,  a  logic  of  the  middle  

rather  than  beginning  or  end,  whose  modifications  of  intensity  are  determined  by  

the  formal  relations  that  constitute  its  logic.2  Such  intensities  characterize  the  ethos  

of  a  non-­‐competitive,  steady-­‐state  value  system  whose  introjection  definitively  

places  each  individual  within  the  system  without  possibility  of  alteration.3  These  

three  plateaus  thus  indicate  regions  of  intensities  in  which  the  dominant  value-­‐

system  of  hegemonic  culture  that  previously  confined  politics  has  come  into  

question—that  is  to  say,  that  politics  now  extends  beyond  cultural  forms  and  the  

2    

values  that  they  institutionalize  rather  than  occurring  within  them.  Politics  now  

must  address  the  transversal  question  of  the  relation  between  cultures.    

Three  plateaus:  About  400,000  years  ago,  homo  sapiens  sapiens  walked  out  of  

Africa  and  eventually  populated  the  entire  earth.4  In  much  more  recent  times,  

measured  by  hundreds  rather  than  hundreds  of  thousands  of  years,  these  human  

populations,  rendered  diverse  through  their  long  history  of  inhabiting  different  

regions  of  the  earth’s  ecology,  began  to  re-­‐encounter  each  other.  Today,  the  

implosion  of  human  diversity  is  an  inescapable  fact  for  us  all.  Two:  Greek  

philosophy,  beginning  about  600  BCE,  formulated  theoretically  the  problem  of  the  

One  and  the  Many,  in  which  the  One  was  the  centre  for  the  determination  of  the  

Many,  formulations  which  Western  philosophy  has  repeated  and  occasionally  

attempted  to  surpass  for  two  and  a  half  millennia.  Three:  In  the  1960s,  the  Royal  

Commission  on  Bilingualism  and  Biculturalism  pondered  the  significance  of  

Canada’s  two  linguistic  communities,  a  concern  whose  meaning  shifted  and  slid  

toward  the  official  recognition  of  many  ethnic  communities  in  the  Canadian  

Multiculturalism  Act  (1988)  which  committed  the  government,  among  other  things,  

to  “foster  the  recognition  and  appreciation  of  the  diverse  cultures  of  Canadian  

society  and  promote  the  reflection  and  the  evolving  expressions  of  those  cultures”  

(section  3h).  These  three  plateaus—one  referring  to  a  history  of  hundreds  of  

thousands  of  years,  another  to  thousands,  and  another  to  decades—signify  the  

complex  temporal  horizons  implicated  in  contemporary  attempts  to  think  diversity.    

 

1.  Opening  the  Question  

3    

I  can  begin  by  situating  the  origin  of  my  thinking  on  multiculturalism  within  

Deleuze’s  philosophy  because  I  seem  to  be  more  or  less  in  agreement  with  his  

account  of  the  origin  of  philosophy.  As  Deleuze  says,  philosophy  begins  in  an  

encounter.5  Thus,  I  would  say,  philosophy  never  masters  its  context,  even  though  its  

thinking  is  not  confined  within  that  context.  Philosophy  universalizes.6  The  being  of  

a  sensible  encounter  demands  thought,  so  that  thought  is  neither  imitative  nor  

descriptive,  but  a  creative  production.  Philosophy  strives  to  understand  the  

encounter  that  provoked  it  and,  in  so  doing,  necessarily  passes  beyond  that  

encounter  to  formulate  an  idea  that  illuminates  the  whole  of  being.  One  of  Deleuze’s  

most  important  thoughts,  in  my  view,  is  that  philosophy  does  not  mainly  combat  

error,  since  error  is  only  the  reverse  image  of  truth,  and  is  thus  circumscribed  by  the  

given  regime  of  truth.  Philosophy  confronts  stupidity.  “Stupidity  is  neither  the  

ground  nor  the  individual,  but  rather  this  relation  in  which  individuation  brings  the  

ground  to  the  surface  without  being  able  to  give  it  form.”7  The  formlessness  in  which  

stupidity  flounders  is  the  inability  to  transform  the  encounter  into  thought.  

Philosophy  struggles  to  give  form  to  an  encounter  that  is  not  the  exclusive  preserve  

of  philosophy  but  a  ‘prior’  that  may  rule  through  its  very  formless  pervasion  of  

experience  and  history.8  Thinking  the  multiple  is  a  struggle  with  a  stupidity  

dumbfounded  by  the  three  plateaus  that  haunt  our  time.    

Canada  is  a  certain  place,  with  a  history,  whose  encounter  poses  several  

questions  for  philosophy.  I  want  to  trace  the  itinerary  of  a  thought  about  diversity,  

multiplicity,  rooted  in  the  Canadian  context,  but  insofar  as  it  is  a  thought,  aiming  at  

an  idea  of  difference  itself.  The  multicultural—as  condition  and  as  encounter,  not  as  

4    

represented  in  government  policy—is  an  idea  in  Deleuze’s  sense,  that  is  to  say,  a  

multiplicity  of  elements  defined  by  their  relation  that  opens  up  a  space  for  

repetition.9  The  idea  of  the  multicultural  pertains  to  a  condition  formulated  in  a  

certain  place  with  a  given  history.  That  this  state  of  the  world  is  problematic  is  what  

motivates  its  formulation  as  an  idea.10  This  idea  affirms  the  question  as  a  question,  

which  clears  a  space  in  which  philosophy  operates.  Multiculturalism  in  this  sense  is  

a  name,  very  likely  an  insufficient  name,  for  a  space  of  inquiry  about  diversity,  

difference,  multiplicity.  Every  attempt  to  define  multiculturalism  positively  as  

realized  equality,  or  state  policy,  or  ideology,  or  liberal  pathos,  or  paternalism,  etc.  

attempts  to  foreclose  this  space  of  inquiry  by  turning  it  into  a  knowledge  within  the  

representation  of  the  social  form.  As  Deleuze  rightly  reminds  us,  the  essence  of  

philosophy  is  not  knowledge  but  learning,  and  learning  requires  facing  the  question  

as  question.11  It  is  the  excess  of  the  idea  that  blocks  the  concept  fixing  the  question  

within  representation,  confining  it  to  a  determinate  meaning,  whereas  philosophy  is  

productive  and  creative,  neither  descriptive  nor  imitative.12    

As  I  have  discovered  it,  thought  about  the  multicultural  in  Canada  is  a  space  for  

inquiry  traversed  by  two  vectors.  When  a  conceptual  opposition  becomes  

insufficient  for  understanding  a  situation,  it  may  be  refigured  as  a  vector,  a  tension,  

or  a  difficult  passage  between  two  poles—defining  in  this  way  a  space  rather  than  a  

conceptual  content.  In  this  thought  there  are  two  vectors:  First,  between  particular  

and  universal  or,  as  I  would  prefer,  particularity-­‐universalization.  A  vertical  vector  

stretching  from  the  particularity  of  a  given  ethno-­‐cultural  group  toward  a  

universalization  within  or  beyond  the  state  sufficient  to  cover,  or  claim,  other  

5    

particularities.  Second,  a  horizontal  vector  between  particulars,  referring  to  

relations  between  different  ethno-­‐cultural  groups.  Through  intensification  of  the  

vector  between  particulars  the  constitution  of  a  universal  has  become  

problematized.  Rather  than  beginning  from  a  universal  that  could  then  subsume  

particulars  underneath  itself,  it  is  a  matter  of  an  emergent  universalization  from  a  

transversal  relation  between  particulars.13  The  transversal  relation  between  

particulars  therefore  becomes  in  political  terms  a  form  of  Proudhon’s  anarchistic  

federalism,  or  a  treaty.    Particularities  are  not  two  particular  cases  of  a  given  

universal,  but  the  transversal  vector  between  them  is  itself  the  location  in  which  

universalization  occurs.      

 

2.  The  Space  of  the  Question  

Let  me  explain  more  specifically  how  the  intensification  of  these  two  vectors  has  

led  to  a  thought  about  difference  focussing  on  emergent  universalization  and  

transversal  federalism.    

The  standard  liberal  model,  predominant  especially  in  France  and  the  U.S.A.  due  

to  a  strong,  fixing,  national  identity,  is  that  the  national  state  is  the  locus  of  universal  

claims  and  rights,  whereas  particular  attachments  are  relegated  to  civil  society  such  

that  private  ethno-­‐cultural  associations  are  merely  individual  choices  without  public  

significance.  The  particular  individual  can  thus  be  straightforwardly  subsumed  by  

the  national  identity  through  the  category  of  citizen.  Canada,  with  its  looser  and  

unstable  national  identity,  is  characterized  by  the  difficulty  of  this  subsumption  such  

that  different  particularities,  and  the  relations  between  such  particularities,  can  

6    

claim  public  significance.  Its  official  politics  thus  represents  a  more  communitarian  

liberalism  than  the  dominant  model,  which  explains  the  interest  in  Canadian  politics  

abroad.  Moreover,  critiques  of  the  official  liberal  communitarianism  rarely  refer  to  

the  standard  French  and  American  model  but  tend  to  argue  for  an  even  more  radical  

opening  toward  the  public  significance  of  particularities.  The  universal  is  thus  not  

safely  located  within  the  nation-­‐state  but  is  inseparable  from  the  relations  of  each  

particularity  to  its  diasporic  community,  the  relation  between  particularities  within  

the  Canadian  polity,  and  universal  claims  connected  to  being  human  as  such.  Thus,  

existing  purported  universals  at  the  national  level  are  continually  subject  to  

critiques  that  claim  they  are  merely  the  particularistic  residues  of  a  historical  elite,  

and  historical  and  new  particularities  continuously  articulate  claims  for  inclusion  

into  the  universal.  It  is  this  tensional  space  within  which  my  own  thought  about  

emergent  universalization  and  transversal  federalism  has  developed  as  a  critique  of  

an  official  Canadian  liberal  communitarianism  that  is  itself  a  critique  of  the  standard  

liberal  model  relegating  particularities  to  private  choice  and  lodging  universality  

unproblematically  in  the  nation-­‐state.  The  paradoxical  thought  of  “universalization  

of  a  right  to  particularity”  began  with  ethno-­‐cultural  belonging  but  I  have  argued  

that  it  can  be  extended  to  social  movement  identities,  or,  indeed,  any  situation  in  

which  a  plurality  of  social  identities  each  strive  for  public  affirmation.14  

In  my  first  intervention  into  these  matters,  I  criticized  the  then-­‐dominant  

hermeneutic  formulation  of  the  relation  between  ethnic  groups.  Hermeneutic  

understanding  is  structured  by  the  founding  problem  of  how  a  subject,  group,  or  

identity  grounded  in  its  own  history  of  practice  and  thought  can  go  out  from  its  

7    

assumptions  to  understand  the  thought  or  practice  of  another  group.  This  us-­‐them  

formulation  is  the  ground-­‐problem  and  the  solution  is  thereby  sought  in  the  

possibility  of  translations  between  cultural  forms.  This  formulation  does  not  

correspond  to  the  ground-­‐problem  of  ethnic  diversity  in  Canada.  Or,  more  exactly,  it  

can  only  be  made  to  correspond  if  the  us-­‐group  is  taken  to  be  an  historical  elite  in  

control  of  the  national  state  challenged  by  the  appearance  of  groups  that  do  not  fit  

into  its  assumptions.  Because  the  us-­‐them  formulation  puts  the  two  groups  on  the  

same  level,  as  an  inside  and  outside,  one  claims  universality  and  the  other  is  

relegated  to  particularity.    

For  reasons,  and  with  implications,  not  fully  clear  to  me  at  the  time,  I  suggested  

that  an  us-­‐we  formulation  was  more  adequate  because  the  different  particularities  

occupied  the  same  space  so  that  the  inside-­‐outside  relation  was  between  different  

particularities  and  also  because  any  universality  was  not  previously  given  but  had  to  

emerge  from  the  relation  between  particularities  themselves.  The  “us”  referred  to  a  

particular  group  and  the  “we”  referred  to  the  national  identity.  Every  individual  can  

be  understood  as  both  a  member  of  a  particular  group,  which  is  different  from  other  

particular  groups,  and  a  member  of  a  universal  group  constituted  by  all  of  the  

particular  groups.  This  is  a  two-­‐level  model  in  which  each  and  every  individual  is  

taken  to  be  both  particular  and  universal.  The  issue  thus  becomes  dual:  what  

relations  between  particularities  are  possible  without  subsuming  them  under  a  

presupposed  unity,  and  what  of  particular  origin  can  be  taken  up  into  universal  

form.    

8    

The  presupposition  of  this  move  is  that,  through  immigration,  all  ethno-­‐cultural  

groups  have  come  to  occupy  the  same  space  which  cannot  be  formulated  simply  as  a  

single  inside-­‐outside  relation  but  must  be  understood  through  an  exteriority  of  one  

particularity  to  others  but  an  interiority  of  all  particulars  to  a  common  universality.  

The  multicultural  context  is  this  relation  of  exteriority  and  interiority  such  that  the  

relation  between  particulars  becomes  a  significant  vector  due  to  the  weakness  of  the  

vector  of  universality  in  subsuming  them.  I  did  not  note  sufficiently  at  that  time  the  

implication  of  reinterpreting  the  historically-­‐dominant  Anglo  elite,  along  with  its  

compromises  with  other  elites,  as  a  particular  group.15  This  made  it  necessary  to  

later  point  out  the  critique  of  empire  implied  by  the  multicultural  context  and  the  

philosophical  critique  of  universals  that  it  implies.  “[C]ritique  of  imperial  

assumptions  …  is  expressed  philosophically  as  the  suspicion  that  established  

universals  hide,  through  their  very  universality,  the  suppression  of  particularities  

through  which  they  were  constituted.”16  This  suspicious  move  is  a  subtraction  in  

Deleuze  and  Guattari’s  sense  of  a  rhizome  as  a  decentred,  multiple  system.  “In  truth,  

it  is  not  enough  to  say.  ‘Long  live  the  multiple,’  difficult  as  it  is  to  raise  that  cry.  …  

The  multiple  must  be  made,  not  by  always  adding  a  higher  dimension,  but  rather  in  

the  simplest  of  ways,  by  dint  of  sobriety,  with  the  number  of  dimensions  one  already  

has  available—always  n-­‐1  (the  only  way  the  one  belongs  to  the  multiple:  always  

subtracted).”17  The  construction  of  the  system  as  decentred  is  a  work  of  the  

imagination  that  puts  thought  at  odds  with  the  centring  inherent  in  historical  power  

and  generates  social  critique.  As  Deleuze  says,  “everything  becomes  ungrounded.  We  

contrast  this  chance  with  arbitrariness  to  the  extent  that  it  is  affirmed,  imperatively  

9    

affirmed,  affirmed  in  the  particular  manner  of  the  question  …  .”18  This  space,  which  

we  may  call  the  multicultural  context,  traversed  by  two  vectors  between  

particularities  and  toward  universalization,  appears  insofar  as  the  centring  elite  is  

displaced  such  that  a  weak  national  identity  becomes  weaker  and  could  only  be  

constructed  anew  from  the  relation  between  particularities  and  not  by  subsuming  

them.  Its  consequence  is  that  the  multicultural  context  cannot  be  seen  as  a  stable  

relation  between  levels  constructing  a  containing  context  for  contained  

particularities.  There  is  rather  a  reversible  and  reflexive  relation  between  content  

and  context  such  that  the  context  may  form  the  basis  for  critique  of  non-­‐

universalizable  particulars  and  particularity  may  form  the  basis  for  critique  of  

insufficient,  still  imperial  universals.19  

 

3.  Particularity  Among  Particularities  

Let  us  then  regard  separately  each  vector  within  the  us-­‐we  structure  of  the  

rhizomic  multiplicity  of  the  multicultural  context:  First,  the  relation  between  

particularities.  The  weak  vertical  vector  fails  to  adequately  subsume  particulars  so  

that  what  is  significant  about  particulars  appears  as  what  is  different  between  them  

rather  than  what  universal  they  exemplify.  Ethno-­‐cultures  within  the  Canadian  

context  are  no  longer  the  ancient  cultures  that  might  be  hermeneutically  defined  by  

their  dialogue  with  their  origin.  Their  relation  to  origin  is  torn  by  an  unbridgeable  

before-­‐after  which  emigration  suffers,  so  that  their  meaning  derives  from  the  

multiplicity  of  the  new  context.  There  is  a  doubly  problematic  relation  here:  First,  

the  new  context  is  only  putatively  a  whole,  a  unity;  it  can  be  one  only  to  the  extent  

10    

that  the  particularities  can  develop  a  new  unity  that  as  yet  remains  on  the  horizon.20  

Second,  particularities  within  this  multiplicity  contain  a  split  relation  to  their  past—

since,  unlike  a  new  nation  with  a  strong  national  identity,  the  past  survives  as  

publicly  significant.21  To  be  sure,  there  is  an  enlightenment  assumption  in  this  

formulation,  but  one  that  is  forged  by  history:  it  is  not  suggested  that  ethno-­‐cultures  

in  their  original  form  are  binding  but  only  in  a  form  that  accepts  its  co-­‐existence  

with  other  particularities.  The  multicultural  context  demands  a  distance  from  one’s  

own  cultural  formation  insofar  as  it  necessarily  accepts  the  equal  legitimacy  of  other  

cultural  forms.  Origin  is  split  in  the  moment  that  the  present  is  pluralized.    

What  sort  of  transversal  relation  between  particularities  is  possible  when  there  

is  a  universal  right  to  particular  identity?  I  have  argued  that  a  recovery  of  Pierre-­‐

Joseph  Proudhon’s  anarchist  conception  of  federalism  is  useful  here  because  it  

refers  only  to  the  external  conditions  of  alliance  and  leaves  the  internal  constitution  

of  groups  outside  consideration.22  A  weak  national  identity  allows  the  constitution  

of  particular  identities  to  flourish  outside  state  control.  It  would  seem  a  poor  

response  to  argue  for  greater  state  control  though  this  is  indeed  a  possible  response  

in  some  new  societies  where  the  myth  of  ancient,  uniform  origin,  such  as  prevails  in  

Europe,  can  be  relied  upon.  In  the  land  occupied  by  Canada  and  other  new  nations,  

Proudhonian  federalism  is  paralleled  by  the  history  of  treaties  between  Aboriginal  

groups  and  between  Europeans  and  Aboriginal  groups.  Affirming  the  history  of  

treaty,  demanding  that  treaties  be  binding,  opens  a  possibility  for  a  conception  of  

the  good  life  which  is  owned  by  no  master,  contains  many  origins,  and  is  

constructed  through  a  transversal  respect  for  other  particularities.  For  these  

11    

reasons  I  have  suggested  that  “the  conversation  about  the  good  life  constructs  a  

friendship  between  traditions  and  thus  not  a  finished  definition  but  a  continuing  

relationship.  Such  friendship  presupposes  the  maintenance  of  viable  approaches  to  

truth,  and  thus  the  merging  of  these  approaches  cannot  be  complete.  This  

incompleteness,  yet  acceptance,  takes  the  political  form  of  a  treaty  and  is  thus  a  

practice  of  peace.”23    

As  Deleuze  and  Guattari  point  out  in  a  similar  manner,  “[t]he  principal  

characteristic  of  the  acentred  system  is  that  local  initiatives  are  coordinated  

independently  of  a  central  power  with  the  calculations  made  throughout  the  

network  (multiplicity).”24  They  base  this  understanding  on  Rosenstiehl  and  Petitot’s  

version  of  the  friendship  theorem:  “If  any  two  given  individuals  in  a  society  have  

precisely  one  mutual  friend,  then  there  exists  an  individual  who  is  the  friend  of  all  

the  others.”25  Deleuze  and  Guattari  wonder  whether  the  friend  constituted  by  this  

mathematical  theorem  might  be  the  classical  philosopher,  but  note  that  he  is  an  

aborted  unity  that  knows  nothing,  and  thus  is  “felt  only  through  its  absence  or  

subjectivity.”26  I  would  agree  that  the  philosopher—indeed  the  very  possibility  of  

philosophy—is  the  source  of  this  friendship,  a  friendship  that  gives  peace  through  

treaty,  whose  absence  as  ruler  allows  for  the  possibility  of  local  coordination.  Such  

decentred  systems  define  thereby  also  the  critique  of  dictatorship  theorems,  which  

define  the  tree-­‐forms  of  centred  power—which  I,  following  the  history  of  Canadian  

philosophy,  call  empire.  “Empire  allows  the  other  to  speak  but  controls  the  rules  of  

interaction  between  speakers  such  that  the  context,  or  rules  of  interaction,  is  itself  

monopolized.”27  A  decentred  system  can  be  thought  on  the  model  of  ecology,  where  

12    

differences  are  locally  coordinated  to  produce  a  balance  deriving  from  the  difference  

between  particularities  and  the  universality  of  the  system  itself  is  a  formulation  of  

such  balance  not  a  subsumption  of  particularities.  In  my  language,  an  imperial,  

centred  system  is  derived  from  a  decentred,  anarchic  federalism  through  a  minority  

bar,  which  bars  what  is  particular  about  the  particularity—its  singularity,  one  may  

say—from  finding  a  place  within  the  universal.  There  are  no  inherent  minorities,  

there  are  only  bars  which  construct  minorities.28  This  is  a  complementary  

description  of  what  Deleuze  called  the  blocking  of  a  concept.  “In  so  far  as  it  serves  as  

a  determination,  a  predicate  must  remain  fixed  in  the  concept  while  becoming  

something  else  in  the  thing  …  .”29  It  is  the  minority  bar  that  fixes  a  particularity  to  

become  subsumed  by  a  universal  and  it  is  the  blocking  of  the  universal  concept  that  

releases  each  predicate  to  become  a  singular  particularity  of  the  particular.  

The  model  that  I  have  presented  here  refrains  in  principle  from  posing  the  

question  of  the  formation  of  a  particular  as  a  particular,  opting  instead  for  the  

Proudhonian  solution  of  deliberately  leaving  this  question  out  of  consideration.  But,  

for  Deleuze,  every  difference  is  constructed  through  a  repetition.  Is  it  possible  that  

this  provides  a  way  of  understanding  the  construction  of  a  particular  that  does  not  

cede  it  to  subsumption?  And,  if  so,  would  this  constitute  a  philosophical  completion  

of  an  aspect  of  this  model  that  I  have  been  proposing?    

What  I  have  called  “the  particularity  of  the  particular,”  in  order  to  refer  to  that  

which  resists  subsumption  under  a  universal,  is  by  Deleuze  called  the  singular,  

which  is  constructed  through  repetition  since  “[t]o  repeat  is  to  behave  in  a  certain  

manner,  but  in  relation  to  something  unique  or  singular  which  has  no  equivalent.”30  

13    

A  singular  as  such  would  be  “an  identity,  produced  by  difference,  [which]  is  

determined  as  ‘repetition’.”31  The  production  of  difference  by  repetition  means  that  

the  new,  singular,  non-­‐equivalent  is  determined  not  by  an  absolute  newness,  as  it  

were,  but  as  a  certain  behaviour  or  occurrence  in  which  that  which  is  repeated  

becomes  singular.  This  occurrence  of  becoming-­‐singular  depends  upon  two  factors:  

on  the  one  hand,  a  rejection  of  the  idea  of  an  absolute  original  that  would  denigrate  

all  copies,  for  an  acceptance  of  simulacra  as  the  matrix  of  singularity.32  On  the  other  

hand,  the  productivity  of  repetition  as  the  construction  of  a  new  set  of  transversal  

relations  which  determine  a  singularity.  Reflection  on  the  multicultural  context  as  a  

repetition  of  ethno-­‐cultural  origins  within  a  set  of  transversal  relations  to  other  such  

ethno-­‐cultures  requires  just  this  sense  of  the  productivity  of  the  new  context.33  The  

task  of  philosophy  shifts  from  tracing  back  to  an  original  that  is  taken  to  be  

determinant  of  subsequent  copies  to  the  originality  of  each  copy,  or  repetition,  

insofar  as  it  adds  something  not  present  at  the  origin.  Any  form  of  conceptual  

representation,  such  as  that  offered  by  the  state,  would  attempt  to  subsume  such  

differences  under  a  universal.  Such  subsumption  gives  meaning  to  the  slogan  

“pluralism  =  monism”34  proffered  by  Deleuze  and  Guattari  insofar  as  many  

exemplars  of  a  single  concept  neither  displace  the  universality  of  the  concept  nor  

engender  transversal  relations  between  exemplars.  Mere  diversity  is  not  enough  if  

the  relations  between  diverse  contents  are  monopolized;  it  is  this  that  I  have  called  

empire.  It  is  for  essentially  this  reason  that  the  play  of  differences,  which  does  offer  

a  new  occurrence,  can  neither  be  predicted  nor  controlled.  A  non-­‐state  discourse  

thus  requires  a  defence  of  transversal  relations  in  the  form  of  treaty,  or  

14    

Proudhonian  federalism,  and  an  in  principle  refusal  to  set  limits  to  the  production  of  

new  singularities  by  the  play  of  difference.  But  whereas  Deleuze  speaks  simply  of  

the  “play  of  singularities”  at  this  point,35  I  think  that  it  is  also  necessary  to  mark  as  

essential  to  the  creation  of  a  singularity  from  a  particular  a  certain  active  

intervention  that  not  only  subtracts  the  particular  from  the  universal,  as  Deleuze  

points  out,  but  asserts  the  particularity  of  the  particularity—that  is  to  say,  demands  

a  singularity  rather  than  a  particularity—against  the  always  predominant  attempt  at  

subsumption.  It  is  certainly  difficult  to  mark  the  difference  clearly  here,  but  I  am  

referring  to  a  certain  activism  of  the  intellect  that  I  would  include  in  philosophy.  I  

have  called  this  move  localization  to  refer  to  “the  thinking  of  the  particular  as  it  

leads  outward  to  other  particulars”  whose  essence  is  “movement,  traversal,  

interplay.”36  This  could  also  be  called  singularization.37  It  is  an  assertion  that  

connects  singulars  to  other  singulars  and  thus  calls  for  a  new  form  of  

universalization  from  such  transversality.  

 

4.  Transversal  Universalization  

The  two  vectors  that  have  opened  up  this  space  pull  in  different  directions,  

toward  two  different  but  internally  related  questions:  First,  as  we  have  seen,  what  is  

a  particularity?  Or,  more  precisely,  what  is  the  localization  that  grounds  the  

particularity  of  the  particular?  If  the  vector  between  particularities  leads  toward  a  

transversal  federalism,  the  vector  rejecting  subsumption  of  particulars  under  a  

given  universal  calls  out  for  a  new  conception  of  universalization  based  on  exactly  

such  transversality.  The  conceptual  space  with  which  we  are  working  is  thus  not  

15    

well  described  as  a  particular-­‐universal  relation.  Since  a  particular  becomes  a  

particular  through  subsumption  under  a  universal,  an  unsubsumable  particular  in  a  

transversal  relation  with  other  particulars  raises  the  possibility  that  

universalization  must  universalize  from  the  transversal  relation  itself—not  from  

either  of  its  particular  termini.38  So,  the  second  question:  what  is  a  universalization  

that  stems  from  the  transversal  relation  between  particularities?  The  condition  for  

this  to  be  a  productive  decentred  space  for  questioning  is  that  thought  can  abandon,  

or  evade,  the  systematic  centring  that  representational  reason  requires—in  

Eurocentrism  or  any  other  kind  of  centrism.39  Like  many  others,  including  Félix  

Guattari,  I  have  turned  to  ecology  to  articulate  such  a  non-­‐centric  totality  in  which  

“universalization  becomes  transversal,  identity  must  be  conceptualized  as  local,  the  

localization  of  a  part.  This  belonging-­‐together  of  different  but  related  localities  can  

be  thought  on  an  ecological  model  of  system,  or  relational  totality.”40  But  this  is  just  

a  beginning.  There  are  several  concepts  in  Deleuze’s  philosophy  that  can  be  helpful  

in  making  it  more  complete.  I  will  confine  myself  here  to  two  ideas—contraction  and  

intensity—from  Difference  and  Repetition.  

Contraction  is  the  effect  of  transversal  relations  on  a  single  element  within  a  

system.  Deleuze  calls  “contemplation”  the  self-­‐regard  that  constitutes  a  subject-­‐

identity  as  such.  Contraction  produces  a  contemplation  such  that  an  element  of  a  

system  has  enough  self-­‐identity  to  pose  for  itself  its  relation  to  its  transversal  

elements.  As  Deleuze  says,  “wheat  is  a  contraction  of  the  earth  and  humidity”  such  

that  wheat  refers  to  “the  elements  that  it  contemplates  in  contracting.”41  Such  

contractions  are  constituted  in  passive  synthesis  and  evident  in  habits,  which  means  

16    

that  the  whole  set  of  transversal  relations  is  present  in  a  given  particular  through  its  

contraction  of  the  other  elements  to  which  it  is  related.  A  given  particular  is  thus  

nothing  else  than  its  contraction  of  transversal  relations.  It  is  a  part  that  

concentrates  the  whole  but  is  not  a  microcosm  of  the  whole,  since  its  singularity  is  

not  shared  by  any  other  element.  Conversely,  we  may  say  that  the  system  as  a  whole  

becomes  a  totality  through  the  concentration  of  the  parts—parts  defined  by  their  

transversal  relations—so  that  neither  is  the  whole  reducible  to  the  sum  of  parts.  The  

whole  is  no  more  macrocosm  than  the  part  is  microcosm  since  the  externality  of  

transversal  relations  defines  both  the  singularity  of  the  part  and  the  concentration  

of  the  whole.42    

An  ecological  whole  of  this  sort  is  stabilized  by  the  habits  of  the  parts,  their  

characteristic  forms  of  behaviour  constituted  in  passive  synthesis.  But  habits  

themselves  are  brought  into  existence  by  contemplating.  “We  do  not  contemplate  

ourselves,  but  we  exist  only  in  contemplating—that  is  to  say,  in  contracting  that  

form  from  which  we  become,”  such  that  “it  is  always  a  third  party  who  says  ‘me’.”43  

It  is  difficult  to  distinguish  contraction  from  contemplation,44  since  Deleuze  

attributes  contemplation  to  everything  in  its  existence,  but  I  think  the  important  

point  here  is  that  the  contraction  of  transversal  relations  that  defines  a  particular  

must  become  at  least  minimally  conscious  to  act.  Perhaps  we  may  say  that  

contraction  defines  a  particular  as  such,  whereas  contemplation  constitutes  

behaviour  as  habit—which  is  the  form  of  action  of  the  particular  on  the  whole.  The  

whole  is  always  conscious  at  the  level  of  the  whole  through  the  layering  of  

transversalities,  whereas  the  contemplation  that  defines  the  activity  of  each  element  

17    

contains  an  unconscious  due  to  the  effect  of  the  whole  upon  it.  Perhaps  the  

distinction  between  particularity  and  singularity  might  come  to  our  aid  here:  the  

particularity  of  an  element  refers  to  its  definition  as  a  contraction  of  the  whole,  

whereas  its  singularity  refers  to  its  behaviour  within  the  whole  constituted  by  

contemplation.    

If  I  have  understood  Deleuze  correctly,  contraction  is  a  central  concept  through  

which  a  non-­‐centric  totality  is  to  be  understood.  If  we  apply  it  to  the  multicultural  

context  of  contemporary  life,  it  means  that  the  content  of  each  sub-­‐culture  is  defined  

through  its  transversal  relations  to  other  sub-­‐cultures  within  this  context  rather  

than  to  its  origin.  Moreover,  its  habitual  conduct  is  a  function  of  its  contemplation  of  

this  context  not  a  mere  hold-­‐over  from  prior  history.  Such  habit  that  characterizes  a  

sub-­‐culture,  if  it  is  historically  precedented,  is  thus  a  re-­‐creation,  a  repetition,  and  

not  a  hermeneutic  continuity.  To  quote  Deleuze,  “[a]  scar  is  the  sign  not  of  a  past  

wound  but  of  ‘the  present  fact  of  having  been  wounded’:  we  can  say  that  it  is  the  

contemplation  of  the  wound,  that  it  contracts  all  the  instants  which  separate  us  from  

it  into  a  living  present.”45  The  past  wound  in  the  case  of  the  multicultural  context  is  

the  before-­‐after  of  emigration.  The  scars  of  the  multicultural  context  constitute  the  

living  present  of  co-­‐existence  and  the  unconscious  of  each  scar  finds  its  articulation  

within  the  whole.  The  multicultural  context  thus  contains  a  hope  for  redemption  of  

historical  wounding.46  

The  other  central  concept  of  a  non-­‐centric,  ecological  whole  proposed  by  

Deleuze  is  “intensity.”  While  he  does  not  refer  to  Bateson  in  explaining  this  concept  

in  Difference  and  Repetition,  we  have  already  seen  that  the  rhizome  is  a  region  of  

18    

intensities  based  on  a  steady-­‐state,  ecological  model  which  incorporates,  as  Bateson  

said,  “a  formal  recognition  of  the  state  of  their  mutual  relationship,  and  possibly,  a  

pegging  of  the  relationship  at  that  state.”47  Deleuze  seems  to  incorporate  this  

Batesonian  meaning  when  he  defines  intensity  as  “the  form  of  difference  in  so  far  as  

this  is  the  reason  of  the  sensible.  …  Disparity—in  other  words,  difference  or  

intensity  (difference  of  intensity)—is  the  sufficient  reason  of  all  phenomena  …  

which  tends  to  deny  or  cancel  itself  out  in  extensity  and  underneath  quality.”48  The  

qualities  that  seem  to  reside  in  particulars,  thereby  constituting  their  singularity,  are  

actually  produced  by  the  field  of  difference  contracted  in  a  given  element.  Not  only  

the  given-­‐ness  of  the  singular  element  is  a  contraction  of  a  transversal  whole  but  

also  the  intensity  of  that  given-­‐ness—that  the  given  is  sensually  given  as  it  is  and  not  

as  other—is  a  product  of  difference  expressed  as  contraction.  Intensity  is  the  ground  

of  what  we  would  normally  call  “singularity”  and  “value”—that  the  given  has  the  

characteristics  which  appear  and  the  weight,  or  effect,  or  importance,  of  that  given-­‐

ness  in  the  perception  of  what  it  is.  Intensity  defines  the  transversal  whole  as  a  

value-­‐laden  whole  initially  at  the  level  of  the  constitution  of  sense  and  thereby  also  

at  the  level  of  value.  “Intensity  or  difference  in  itself  thus  expresses  differential  

relations  and  their  corresponding  distinctive  points.  …  [E]ach  intensity  clearly  

expresses  only  certain  relations  or  certain  degrees  of  variation.”49  The  transversal  

whole  is  thus  a  value-­‐laden  whole  in  which  the  perception  of  elements  with  specific  

qualities  underlies  the  value,  or  significance,  attributed  to  such  elements  within  the  

whole.    

19    

With  these  two  ideas  of  contraction  and  intensity  Deleuze  explicates  key  

features  of  a  non-­‐centric  whole  that  explain  the  recourse  to  the  idea  of  an  ecological  

whole  to  describe  the  relations  of  the  multicultural  context  and  perhaps  make  a  

distinctive  contribution  to  the  idea  of  ecology  itself.  In  conclusion,  I  can  then  say  that  

the  notions  of  the  particularity  of  the  particular  as  a  repetition  and  the  contraction  

and  intensity  of  a  transversal  whole  usefully  explicate  the  point  to  which  I  came  in  

elucidating  the  originality  of  the  multicultural  context.  In  Canada,  that  context  has  

become  the  site  of  a  fundamental  philosophical  interrogation  of  the  relation  

between  identity  and  difference  whose  implications  are  not  confined  to  Canada.  

Dialogue  with  Deleuze,  and  negotiation  of  some  differences  of  terminology,  have  

shown—it  seems  to  me—a  convergence  that  has  certainly  intensified  my  interest  in  

Deleuze’s  philosophy.    

To  return  to  a  previous  note,  failure  to  understand  what  is  at  issue  in  the  

multiplicity  of  cultural  formation  is  not  an  error  but  stupidity—a  stupidity  that  we  

can  no  longer  afford,  but  which  will  continue  to  plague  our  time,  as  will  the  

unconscious  effects  of  particularity  and  its  dangerous  slide  into  particularism  and  

fantasies  of  cleansing.  Stupidity  is  always  with  us  and  it  is  the  task  of  philosophy  to  

confront  not  only  its  provenance  and  its  effects  but  also  its  ecology,  and  anti-­‐

ecology,  whereby  the  whole  disappears  from  view.  Perhaps  in  this  way  we  might  

properly  inhabit  the  three  plateaus  with  which  I  began:  walking  out  of  Africa,  

around  the  globe,  and  re-­‐encountering  ourselves  again;  the  problem  of  the  One  and  

the  Many  as  bequeathed  by  Greek  philosophy;  and  the  Canadian  problem  of  

20    

diversity  which  has  exceeded  all  attempts  to  circumscribe  it  within  a  definite  

representation.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Footnotes:  

                                                                                                               

1  Gilles  Deleuze  and  Félix  Guattari,  A  Thousand  Plateaus:  Capitalism  and  Schizophrenia,  trans.  Brian  Massumi  (London:  The  Athlone  Press,  1988)  pp.  21-­‐2.  2  Gregory  Bateson,  “Bali:  The  Value  System  of  a  Steady  State”  in  Steps  to  an  Ecology  of  Mind  (Toronto:  Random  House,  1972)  p.  113.  3  Ibid,  pp.  107-­‐8,  123,  114-­‐5.  4  Richard  Leakey,  The  Origin  of  Humankind  (New  York:  Basic  Books,  1994)  chapter  5.  5  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  trans.  Paul  Patton  (New  York:  Columbia  University  Press,  1994)  p.  139.  6  “The  beginning  of  philosophy  is  in  a  decisive  act  whereby  the  situation  of  the  thinker  is  interrogated  as  a  way  of  understanding  the  human  condition.  While  a  received  tradition  incorporates  this  situation  as  a  centre  that  is  presupposed  within  it—a  centre  that  defines  both  the  content  and  the  form  of  inquiry—the  decisive  act  that  initiates  radical  inquiry  can  count  on  no  precedent.”  Ian  Angus,  A  Border  Within:  National  Identity,  Cultural  Plurality  and  Wilderness  (Montreal  and  Kingston:  McGill-­‐Queen's  Press,  1997)  p.  105.  

7  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  152.  8  “But  in  the  forging  of  English  Canadian  philosophy,  the  outside  is  not  silence,  but  an  unbroken  outpouring  of  sound.  Absence,  not  of  sensing,  but  of  meaning—the  Other  side  of  the  border  a  madness  of  unguided  sound.”  Ian  Angus,  A  Border  Within,  p.  133.  9  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  pp.  182-­‐91,  20.  

21    

                                                                                                               

10  “The  ‘problematic’  is  a  state  of  the  world,  a  dimension  of  the  system,  and  even  its  horizon  or  its  home:  it  designates  precisely  the  objectivity  of  Ideas,  the  reality  of  the  virtual.”  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  280.  11  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  166.  12  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  289.  13  It  may  be  interesting  to  point  out  that  even  my  use  of  the  term  “transversal,”  which  is  of  course  fundamental  for  Deleuze  and  Guattari,  did  not  originate  with  them  but  in  the  notion  of  a  “lateral  universal”  in  Maurice  Merleau-­‐Ponty,  "From  Mauss  to  Claude  Levi-­‐Strauss"  in  Richard  C.  McCleary  (trans.)  Signs  (Evanston:  Northwestern  University  Press,  1964).  14  Ian  Angus,  A  Border  Within,  pp.  176-­‐85;  Ian  Angus,  Identity  and  Justice  (Toronto:  University  of  Toronto  Press,  2008)  pp.  70-­‐3.  15  No  doubt  the  biographical  origin  of  this  move  was  my  immigration  to  Canada  as  a  working  class,  Scottish-­‐English,  English-­‐speaking  child  so  that  I  found  myself  marked  in  the  eyes  of  certain  others  as  a  member  of  the  elite  while  not  actually  belonging  to  it.    16  Ian  Angus,  Identity  and  Justice,  p.  13.  17  Deleuze  and  Guattari,  A  Thousand  Plateaus,  p.  6.  Emphasis  in  original.  18  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  200.  Emphasis  in  original.  The  distinction  between  arbitrariness  and  chance  that  Deleuze  makes  by  means  of  Neitzschean  affirmation  has  a  resonance  in  my  text  in  the  distinction  between  contingency  and  particularity,  made  in  critique  of  Sartre  and  Rorty,  to  argue  that  “contemporary  philosophical  discourse  is  paralyzed  by  a  contradiction”  and,  in  opposition  “paving  the  way  for  a  renewal  of  the  particularity-­‐universalizing  …  nexus.”  The  affirmation  in  question  was  explained  this  way:  “Particularity  thus  involves  embracing  ethno-­‐cultural  identity,  not  just  inheriting  it.  …  The  multicultural  context  establishes  the  difference  in  one’s  own  case  between  being  seen  from  the  outside  and  experienced  as  one’s  own  from  within.  This  distinction  allows  the  transfer  to  others  of  the  necessity  for  affective  belonging  of  ethno-­‐cultural  components  that  do  not  have  this  meaning  for  me.”  Ian  Angus,  A  Border  Within,  pp.  160,  161.  19  Ian  Angus,  A  Border  Within,  p.  166.  The  reference  on  this  page  (footnote  51)  to  an  article  by  Vernon  E.  Cronen,  Kenneth  M.  Johnson  and  John  W.  Lannamann  entitled  “Paradoxes,  Double  Binds,  and  Reflexive  Loops:  An  Alternative  Theoretical  Perspective,”  Family  Process,  Vol.  20,  March  1982  (researchers  all  deeply  influenced  by  Bateson)  perhaps  conceals  an  influence  from  Bateson  in  my  text  that  naturally  comes  up,  as  it  does  for  Deleuze  and  Guattari,  whenever  one  wants  to  express  an  apparently  hierarchical  relation  as  one  of  mutual  reflexive  reversibility.  Deleuze  and  Guattari,  A  Thousand  Plateaus,  pp.  21-­‐2.  20  This  is  the  way  that  Winthrop  Bell,  the  only  Canadian  student  of  Edmund  Husserl,  posed  the  question  in  a  lecture  during  the  First  World  War.  See  Winthrop  Pickard  Bell,  “The  Idea  of  a  Nation”  (edited,  with  an  introduction,  by  Ian  Angus),  Symposium:  Canadian  Journal  of  Continental  Philosophy,  Vol.  16,  No.  2,  2012.  

22    

                                                                                                               

21  Ian  Angus,  A  Border  Within,  pp.  141-­‐4.    22  Ian  Angus,  Identity  and  Justice,  pp.  73-­‐6.  23  Ian  Angus,  Identity  and  Justice,  p.  91.  This  is  the  last  word  of  that  text.    24  Deleuze  and  Guattari,  A  Thousand  Plateaus,  p.  519-­‐20  ftn.  15,  referring  to  Pierre  Rosenstiehl  and  Jean  Petitot,  “Automate  asocial  et  systèmes  acentrés,”  Communications,  22  (1974)  pp.  45-­‐62.  For  a  mathematical  proof  of  the  theorem,  see  Herbert  S.  Wilf,  “The  Friendship  Theorem”  in  D.G.A.  Walsh  (ed.),  Combinatorial  Methematics  and  its  Applications  (Academic  Press:  New  York,  1969).  25  Deleuze  and  Guattari,  A  Thousand  Plateaus,  p.  17,  quoting  Pierre  Rosenstiehl  and  Jean  Petitot,  “Automate  asocial  et  systèmes  acentrés,”  Communications,  22  (1974)  pp.  45-­‐62.  26  Deleuze  and  Guattari,  A  Thousand  Plateaus,  p.  17.  27  Ian  Angus,  Identity  and  Justice,  p.  83.  

28  Ian  Angus,  Identity  and  Justice,  pp.  82-­‐8.  29  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  12.  30  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  1;  cf.  176.  31  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  41.  32  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  pp.  66-­‐8,  265,  299.  33  Ian  Angus,  A  Border  Within,  pp.  141-­‐4.  Similarly,  culture  must  be  understood  not  simply  as  a  content  but  as  a  pattern  of  contents.  Ibid,  p.  117.  34  Deleuze  and  Guattari,  A  Thousand  Plateaus,  p.  20.  35  “Beneath  the  general  operation  of  laws,  however,  there  always  remains  the  play  of  singularities.”  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  25.  36  Ian  Angus,  Identity  and  Justice,  p.  26,  31.    37  See  Ian  Angus,  “The  Pathos  of  a  First  Meeting:  Particularity  and  Singularity  in  the  Critique  of  Technological  Civilization,”  Symposium:  Canadian  Journal  of  Continental  Philosophy,  Vol.  16,  No.  1,  2012.  

38  The  influence  of  Ernesto  Laclau  was  important  for  me  to  understand  the  reversibility  of  the  container-­‐contained  relation  in  English  Canada,  however,  in  retrospect,  it  is  clear  that  understanding  universalization  as  a  hegemonic  relation  is  an  error.  For  Laclau,  every  universalization  is  a  particular  modified  in  no  respect  claiming  a  universal  status  that  allows  it  to  subsume  other  particulars.  The  argument  that  I  am  clarifying  here  for  a  universalization  emergent  from  relation  between  particularities  neither  leaves  the  particularities  untouched  nor  aims  at  a  new  subsumption.  See  Ernesto  Laclau,  whose  claim  that  “the  ethical  is  the  moment  of  the  universality  of  the  community”  even  while  “society  consists  only  of  particularities,  and  that  in  this  sense,  all  universality  will  have  to  be  incarnated  in  something  that  is  utterly  incommensurable  with  it”  means  that  universality  is  in  the  end  nothing  more  than  a  hyper-­‐investment  in  a  particularity.  It  is  evidently  the  ontological  commitment  of  being  as  always  particular  that  determines  this  reduction.  “Identity  and  Hegemony:  The  Role  of  Universality  in  the  Constitution  of  Political  Logics,”  in  Judith  Butler,  Ernesto  Laclau  and  Slavoj  Žižek,  Contingency,  

23    

                                                                                                               

Hegemony,  Universality  (London:  Verso,  2000)  pp.  80-­‐1.  Laclau’s  hegemonic  notion  of  populism  similarly  reduces  universality  to  “a  part  which  claims  to  be  the  whole.”  Ernesto  Laclau,  On  Populist  Reason  (London:  Verso,  2007)  p.  83.  A  universalization  that  proceeds  not  from  a  particular  but  from  a  transversal  relation  between  particularities  does  not  reduce  universality  to  particularity  but  demands  a  new,  genuine  concept  of  universalization  as  well  as  a  non-­‐reductive  ontology.  39  “In  each  case  the  core  issue  is  the  tendency  within  the  field  of  social  power  to  group  differences  around  an  organizing  centre  that  I  called  a  “system”  and  critics  usually  articulate  through  reference  to  post-­‐structuralist  authors.  To  this  extent  I  regret  that,  to  my  knowledge,  no  critics  have  taken  on  my  argument  for  a  general  critique,  not  only  of  Eurocentrism,  but  of  all  centrisms  (A  Border  Within,  pp.  108-­‐11).  For  it  is  a  fundamental  issue  here  whether  such  a  general  critique  is  possible,  as  I  suspect,  or  whether  every  discourse  necessarily  contains  a  centring  principle  as  the  post-­‐structuralist  influence  would  propose.  Here,  as  I  have  emphasized  already,  one  must  confront  not  only  the  centring  involved  in  social  power  but  also  the  justification  for  decentring  required  for  critique.”  Ian  Angus,  “Identity  and  Deference:  A  Border  Within  15  Years  On”  at  Britishness  Past  and  Present  -­  with  particular  reference  to  Canada,  Australia  and  the  UK  (30  November  -­‐  1  December  2012,  Aarhus  University,  Denmark)  to  be  published  in  the  Journal  of  Canadian  Studies.  40  Félix  Guattari,  The  Three  Ecologies,  trans.  Ian  Pindar  and  Paul  Sutton  (Continuum:  London,  2005);  Ian  Angus,  “The  Concept  of  Empire  in  Critical  Social  Theory,”  Imaginaires  Collectifs,  Interculturalisme  et  Histoire:  autour  de  l'oeuvre  de  Gérard  Bouchard;  Collective  Imaginaries,  Interculturalism  and  History:  around  the  work  of  Gérard  Bouchard,  26-­‐28  Sept.  2013,  Banff  Centre,  Alberta.  41  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  75.  42  The  word  “concentration”  is  not  used  by  Deleuze,  but  I  can  find  no  word  used  by  him  to  define  the  form  of  unification  in  a  transversal  totality,  so  I  have  used  this  one  as  the  opposite,  as  it  were,  of  the  contraction  that  finds  the  whole  of  transversal  relations  in  the  part.  Concentration  refers  to  the  totalization  of  the  parts  through  the  transversal  relations  that  constitute  each  part—that  is  to  say,  the  overlay  of  transversalities  into  a  unity.  43  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  74,  75.  44  Deleuze  calls  “fatigue”  the  uncompacting  of  contraction  and  contemplation  such  that  the  part  needs,  and  lacks,  the  whole.  “Fatigue  marks  the  point  at  which  the  soul  can  no  longer  contract  what  it  contemplates,  the  moment  at  which  contemplation  and  contraction  come  apart.”  (Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  77.)  this  would  seem  to  mean  that  in  fatigue  the  whole  is  not  reinforced  by  the  part  such  that  the  balance  between  the  two  breaks  down—what  also  might  be  called  a  “break  boundary.”  

45  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  77.  46  See  Ian  Angus,  “Continuing  Dispossession:  Clearances  as  a  Literary  and  Philosophical  Theme”  Modern  Horizons,  Vol.  3,  June  2012.  Available  at  

24    

                                                                                                               

http://www.modernhorizonsjournal.ca/June%202012.html,  reprinted  in  The  Undiscovered  Country:  Essays  in  Canadian  Intellectual  Culture  (Edmonton:  Athabasca  University  Press,  2013).  

47  Gregory  Bateson,  “Bali:  The  Value  System  of  a  Steady  State,”  p.  113.  48  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  222-­‐3,  cf.  228.  49  Gilles  Deleuze,  Difference  and  Repetition,  p.  252.