Deleuze — or Die Trying

I've been plodding for some days now through Out of This World, a piece of secondary scholarship by Peter Hallward on his postmodern eminence, Gilles Deleuze. His exegesis I find frequently illuminating, though it often hews a bit too closely to Deleuze's own argot and peculiar spin on all things metaphysical (a shortcoming I've found in secondary scholarship on Derrida, as well), making for occasional knots of prose as impenetrable as that of his subject.

What I've taken from Hallward's study is the relationship of an individual — a discrete, singular entity — to the conditions of her existence is much like that of a character in a shoot-'em-up video game. I haven't played a video game in many years, but I recall that often the character under my control would have some sort of vitality or "life" meter above his head, which was indicate to me, the force behind his actions, how much more injury he can sustain before dying. This life meter is something that represents the video game character's state of well-being — a measure of what is otherwise dynamic of conditioning, constitutive forces — and is something the character cannot directly perceive about himself. Only I, the game player situated outside the field of the game's immediate action, enjoys this view on the character I control. That which the life-meter indicates, i.e., the imperceptible roil of vital forces that at any moment are dwindling or surging, is, however, no less essential to him that his observable features and condition.

According to Deleuze, we are in a similar state. Everything about us we take to be solid and substantial dissolves into the refulgent flare and shimmer of determinant forces, which, rather than lying beyond us in some realm of the transcendent or Ideal, "hover" above us in a manner roughly analogous to the life-meter above the video-game character of my example. Deleuze therefore declares philosophy's task as widening, if not as opening altogether, channels of intuition that can put us in touch with these hovering forces, immanent to us but no where perceivable by us, which occupy what Deleuze terms "the virtual."

This is all I can confidently speak to at the moment, but I'm reasonably certain I'm beginning to master Deleuze's thought — even to the extent where I'm beginning to dispute some points of his. But more on that later . . .

Please offer comments, especially if you find me incorrect or otherwise deficient in anything.