stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

elongs to it because not even its own self really belongs to it. Instead, the Overman understands
that the concept is produced precisely to the extent that one remains the passive self even when
one becomes an individual. “It is the empty form of time which introduces and constitutes
Difference in thought, on the basis of which it thinks…It is this which engenders thought within
thought, for thought thinks only by means of difference, around this point of ungrounding” (DR
276). In other words, the Overman understands that the concept is produced in this encounter
with the power of difference: “there is only involuntary thought, aroused but not constrained
within thought, and the more absolutely necessary for being born, illegitimately, of
fortuitousness of the world…[C]ount upon the contingency of an encounter with that which
forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to
think” (DR 139). I think that one can understand this encounter in terms of friendship. Friends
are often similar to each other. In other words, they share ways of thinking. But it is also the case
that friends cannot quite tell who among them is the first to have come up with this particular
way of thinking that they all share. It kind of all happens between them. In fact it is through that
happening between them that they become friends in the first place. But that is not all. This
particular way of thinking constitutes what I call myself. But this thinking is not mine. Nor is it
my friend’s. I am not me. Nor is he he. It all happened between us. One example of what
Deleuze means by difference is this happening between us. For this reason, we can say that if
there is a Cogito in Deleuze that Cogito cannot take the form of an ‘I think;’ instead, it must take
the form of an Overman or the Cogito who says ‘we think’ where this ‘we’ does not designate a
collection of two individuals but rather a passage of a power of difference. Zourabichivili puts it
well. “Une dernière reformulation du cogito pourrait donc être ‘On pense’ ou encore ‘il pense’ au
sens où l’on dit qu’il pleut et qu’il y a du vent” (Zourabichivili 111).
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