Deleuze, Phenomenology, and the Rhythms of Experience

Abstract

This article proposes a dialogue between Gilles Deleuze’s concept of rhythm and the phenomenological tradition as it pertains to the structure of experience. The author develops the hypothesis that human experience is fundamentally permuted by a rhythmic structure moving between habits and their liminal disruptions. In order to make this rhythmic structure explicit, experience is articulated into different instances—habitual, liminal, and their relation. It is demonstrated that: (1) habitual rhythms are permuted by a pattern characterized by the metric repetition of identical elements; (2) liminal rhythms, by contrast, are characterized by a non-identical repetition in which difference reoccurs; and (3) rhythm thus characterizes experience as a whole, functioning as the unifying relation between habitual order and liminal chaos—chaosmos. Drawing on the method of a dialogue between the poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the oikological phenomenologist Hans Rainer Sepp, the article argues that rhythm cannot be defined solely by the repetition of the same, as in habit, or by the repetition of difference, as in the liminal, but must instead be understood as the unity of a ground that relates both.