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

‘quasi-causes’ following laws which perhaps express in each case the relative unity or mixture of
bodies on which they depend for their real causes” (LS 6). For this reason, counter-actualization
culminates in an ethical project. In other words, it is only in ethics that we can counter-actualize
events.
But what does it mean to counter-actualize an event? In this regard Deleuze talks about
the wound. When bodies such as guns, humans, and political ideologies enter into a relationship
of causality, in other words, when they mix they produce certain states of affairs such as my
wound. However, my wound is not the only thing that the causality of bodies produces. Instead,
it also actualizes an event. This event is not my wound. Deleuze often argues that events have
always already happened and are always about to happen, but are never actually happening:
“only the past and future inhere in time and divide each present infinitely” (LS 5). In this sense,
the event is actually ‘to wound.’ Deleuze insists that counter-actualization is not about willing
the states of affairs. In other words, it is not about accepting your wound. “What then does it
mean to will the event? Is it to accept war, wounds, and death when they occur? It is highly
probable that resignation is only one more figure of ressentiment, since ressentiment has many
figures” (LS 149). Instead, it is about willing ‘to wound.’ Deleuze often talks about acting or
miming the event. “The actor or actress represents, but what he or she represents is always still in
the future and already in the past, whereas his or her representation is impassible and
divided...neither acting nor being acted upon” (LS 150). In “the Ethics of the Event” Levi R.
Bryant explains that “the mime is one who liberates the pure essence of an event from its specific
spatio-temporal actualization in the world or specific circumstances, capturing the sense of that
event independent of any context or circumstances” (Bryant 35). Bryant gives an interesting
example in this regard. “For example, the mime simulates trying to control one’s umbrella while
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