Pragmatics of a World To-Be-Made

Abstract

We might as well begin with a paradox. After all, how is the problematic expressed if not through a sort of paradox of our present, one whereby the present becomes fugitive, boiling over itself, constituting a time ‘while passing in the time constituted’ (Deleuze 1994: 79)? So does the proposition of this book, of thinking the problematic, confront us with a paradox in which the problematic makes itself manifest, from which it cracks open, proffering itself fugitively in search of new presents. And the paradox is this: What does thought ever do, if it does not think the problematic? What is thinking if not the event of becoming possessed by a problematic one cannot shake, let alone properly state, a problematic that spurs the thinker into thinking, feeling and doing? This is what William James (1890: 401) alluded to when he suggested that ‘the thought is itself the thinker, and psychology needs not look beyond’. For the thinker is constituted as such by a problematic for which it becomes a means.1 James expounded on this idea with his concept of a ‘fringe’, a fringe of felt relations on the edge of which thoughts – which is also to say, thinkers – swim. The fringe constitutes a vector of indetermination, and in ‘all voluntary thinking there is some topic or subject about which all the members of the thought revolve. Half the time this topic is a problem, a gap we cannot yet fill with a definite picture, word, or phrase, but which, in the manner described some time back, inf luences us in an intensely active and determinate psychic way. Whatever may be the images and phrases that pass before us, we feel their relation to this aching gap. To fill it up is our thought’s destiny.’ (James 1890: 80)