Deleuze, the Ritual and Magic as the Formation of Sense
Deleuze, the Ritual and Magic as the Formation of Sense

Summary/Abstract: What is a ritual? A ritual is an enactment, an ordered series of actions to invoke certain states of consciousness, spiritual entities or to provoke an influence that ripples from the domain of imagination and intention to manifest spiritual, social, personal and/ or material effects. A ritual is bound up with repetition in connotation and practice; we repeat a ritual in the endeavour to induce again a particular outcome of effects. G. Deleuze’s philosophy has been productively compared with hermeticism (Ramey, 2012). If we mine the philosophical oeuvre of Deleuze, we can derive fresh insight into the nature of the ritual, what it expresses, and how it operates. For Deleuze, repetition is not what we think it is. Repetition secretly expresses difference and change: repetition is novelty. Repetition is the invocation of chaos, chaos as ordered structure, activating a non-chronological model of time that Deleuze calls the Aion. In Deleuze’s lexicon, the ritual can be conceived as a practice of magic that endeavours to create chains of resonance which energise a dimension of sense, as well as sense-experience or sensation. The inscription of sense is the generation of meaning, and creates new significations, how myth and poetry attain their valences, and is the promise of revolution or transformation. The inscription of sense is the creation of an effect, and the opening of a world. Sense creates existence through its expression, and thus is the locus of magic, as well as its invocation in the ritual

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