Twelveth Series of Paradox

Axiom: "A mental Void" = "Aion" (74)

Page 75: Deleuze equates "good sense" with bifurcation, dialectics, the powers of division and negation, the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, etc. We said earlier that this "formula" would be akin to cutting the Pascal distribution in half. Deleuze states that good sense takes us from the "most to the least differentiated"; i.e. by cutting a large distribution several times, you eventually come up with a large host of small factors of a number. What Deleuze then points out is that there is always an undifferentiated remainder which results as a product of these bifurcations (e.g. you must always take one path at the fork in the road); this remainder can be likened to the repressed, perhaps, or Deleuze uses the example of a hill that adjoins a open space used for an enclosure; either way, it has some kind of undifferentiated potential energy.

Page 77: Deleuze speaks of the "opposite" of good sense, which would be a "recreation". This is the key to sense -- that it arises organically, like a witty joke, an epiphany showing a sense of perversion -- of taking a structure and twisting it, giving it an extra arm, etc. This is in opposition to "good sense" or logic by division or negation.

Page 77: Deleuze states that Chronos goes from past to future "only to the degree that presents follow one another inside partial worlds or partial systems." In our example, this is akin to the decomposition from one large number to a smaller "world" or number by means of factorization (i.e. bifurcation). These groups of partial, decomposed groups are arranged in nested form.

Page 77: "To the oriented line of the present, which 'regularizes' in an individual system each singular point which it takes in, the line of the Aion is opposed." The Pascal triangles are "organ"-ized, oriented, nested, as opposed to the moment of Aion, which is the moment of difference, the differentiator. Chronos is "regularized" insofar as it has been disciplined. In this way, Chronos are the organs, and Aion is the surface, the skin that is being constantly stetched. In the process of stretching and folding skin, you get new organs; hence the outside becomes the inside. These organs, or Pascal triangles, or "functions", are what Deleuze denotes as "common sense".

Page 80: Humpty Dumpty's pure intensity comes up again: "he is uniquely made of shifting and 'disconcerting' singularities.

Page 80: "One does not grow without the other shrinking." Explaining this statement within the Pascal triangle visualization is difficult. I believe it means that if you have two triangles that have come into intersection, they generate a GCD which is larger than either; hence, they both shrink. Or could it mean that the GCD moves over to one side or the other, thereby shrinking the other (i.e. taking its common factors with it)?

"Nonsense has a internal and original relation to sense." (81)