Who is the dialectician, who dialectizes the relationship? It is the slave, the slave’s perspective, the way of thinking belonging to the slave’s perspective. The famous dialectical aspect of the master-slave relationship depends on the fact that power is conceived not as a will to power but as a representation of power, representation of superiority, recognition by “the one” of the superiority of “the other”. What the wills in Hegel want is to have their power recognized, to represent their power.
…
Underneath the Hegelian image of the master we always find the slave.
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Gilles Deleuze, ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ (via doesnotequal)
What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person’s own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person’s. Heavenly nuptials, mulitplicities of multiplicities. Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that someone can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. […]Above all, it should not be thought that it suffices to distinguish the masses and exterior groups someone belongs to or participates in from the internal aggregates that person envelops in himself or herself. They are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places—machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in motion at a given moment, forming an assemblage productive of statements: ‘I love you’ (or whatever).
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Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (via adornoble)
Manuel Delanda performs an amazing trick in this video. Not only does he untangle the threads of Deleuze’s thinking and profoundly connects it to complexity science but also makes a profound case for the role of philosophy as a synthetic discipline that can overcome the disciplinary barriers within science. Highly recommended.
I have a soft spot for Manuel, especially now that I’ve heard he has an accent. Also for his snide polemical remarks like “I don’t care what people say, idealism is inherently conservative” (but his swipe at Derrida sounds super amateur). Also cuz he talks about cool science things like genetics, computer science, and cool art/architecture things, and other things I don’t understand but wanna.
I think DeLanda (and perhaps Catherine Malabou? But I haven’t really read her) is one of the best challenges to the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. The divide usually lies in that analytic philosophy is supposed to be more focused on the ‘sciences’, while continental is focused on the ‘arts’. But DeLanda, definitely coming from the continental camp, is far more focused on the sciences, and is doing it in a way that’s far better than the analytic camp.
The beginning of his Philosophy and Synthetic Reason taught me more about emergence than a whole semester on the topic - and this is because he’s more sensitive to the Evental character of science. Whereas most analytic authors saw developments in complexity and emergence and thought “awesome! how can we fit this in ready-made debates about consciousness?” DeLanda saw this stuff and went “how does this fundamentally change the way we think about the world (if it does)?” And the latter seems a lot more important to me.
DeLanda does more clear synthesis (via Deleuze mostly) of the subcurrents of ALL THE KINDS OF THOUGHTS than I have ever encountered
I’ve learned more (and connected more together via, and had more falling-off-chair fist-pumping moments because of) his lecture series/writing than ANYONE else
sterling your comments are perfect and YES (I need to read Malabou now I’m guessing?)
he’s literally how to intravenously Deleuze and see it as cleanly pervasive, it’s beautiful
“The example of patriarchy provides an illustration of how the concept of “minority” is used: while there may be more women than men numerically, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, which are sensitive to relations of power, men still constitute the majority whereas women form a minority. Thus the concept of “becoming-minor” converges with that of “becoming-woman” (as they say, “everyone has to ‘become-woman’, even women…”),”becoming-animal”, “becoming-molecular”, “becoming-imperceptible” and ultimately, “becoming-revolutionary”. Each type of affective becoming marks a new phase of a larger process that Deleuze and Guattari call deterritorialization.”
Dionysus affirms all that appears, “even the most bitter suffering”, and appears in all that is affirmed. Multiple and pluralist affirmation - this is the essence of the tragic. This will become clearer if we consider the difficulties making everything an object of affirmation. Here the effort and the genius of pluralism are necessary, the power of transformations, Dionysian laceration. When anguish and disgust appear in Nietzsche it is always at this point: can everything become an object of affirmation, that is to say of joy? We must find, for each thing in turn, the special means by which it is affirmed, by which it ceases to be negative.
We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters.
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Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control
There is not a world that contains time; there is a flow of time, which produces ‘worlds’ or durations. Time is a virtual whole of divergent durations: different rhythms or pulsations of life which we can think or intuit. The everyday illusion is that life flows from one moment to the next and that we exist ‘in’ some general line of time. We can be freed from this illusion of a homogeneous, linear and undifferentiated
time only by thinking of time as an intensive flow…
We tend to spatialise time. We map or represent time by the
movement of the sun across the sky, the hands moving around a clockface or some other moving body. In doing so we locate time within the world we perceive, within an actualised world of images.
“and that’s what being on the Left is: knowing that the minority is everyone.”
“G as in Gauche (Left)”
Gilles Deleuze: From A to Z with Claire Parnet Semiotext(e) and MIT Press
There is no truth of the world as it is in thought, no reality of the sensible world, all is evaluation, even and above all the sensible and the real. […] Being, truth, and reality are themselves only valid as evaluations, that is to say as lies.
